AI Chatbots Are Giving Voters Wrong Answers About Which Party to Support
A new study tested AI tools during Hungary's 2025 parliamentary elections and found they recommended parties that weren't even on the ballot. Here's what that means if you ever ask a chatbot for voting advice.
Key points
- A study published by civil liberties group Liberties found AI chatbots gave inaccurate, inconsistent voting advice during Hungary's 2025 parliamentary elections.
- Chatbots sometimes recommended political parties that were not running in the election at all.
- Identical questions put to the same AI tools produced wildly different answers each time.
- Researchers concluded that general-purpose AI systems, meaning chatbots built for everyday tasks rather than specialist use, cannot be relied on for electoral guidance.
Ask a chatbot which party you should vote for and you might get an answer. You might even get a confident, well-written answer. But a new study suggests that answer could be completely wrong.
Researchers tested AI chatbots, the kind of conversational tools powered by large language models (the same underlying technology that runs ChatGPT and similar assistants), during this year's Hungarian parliamentary elections. What they found was alarming. The tools recommended parties not standing in the election, skipped parties that were actually on the ballot, and gave starkly different answers when asked the exact same question twice. Think of it like asking a friend for directions and getting a different route every single time, including one that sends you to a street that doesn't exist.
The study was published by Liberties, a European civil liberties organisation, and first reported by The Guardian. It focused specifically on real election conditions, not a lab test. Real prompts, real election, real mess.
Should voters be worried?
Yes, if they plan to use a chatbot as a shortcut to deciding how to vote. The researchers described the results as raising "serious concerns" about using general-purpose AI in electoral settings. These tools are built to be helpful across thousands of topics. Elections require precision: the right parties, the right dates, the right rules. That precision is exactly where the chatbots stumbled.
Practically speaking, if you ask an AI assistant something like "which party best matches my views on healthcare?", the answer it returns may name a party that folded two years ago, miss the obvious frontrunner, or give your neighbour a completely different list if they type the same words an hour later.
The inconsistency matters as much as the inaccuracy. A tool that is sometimes wrong is hard to trust. A tool that is randomly wrong is worse, because you cannot even know when to double-check.
This is not an argument that AI tools are useless. For drafting a meal plan or summarising a long document, these tools do fine. Voting decisions sit in a different category: the stakes are civic, the facts are specific, and a hallucination (when an AI confidently states something false) can nudge someone toward a party that doesn't exist.
The practical advice is simple. Use official government election websites or your country's official electoral commission for any voting information. Treat chatbot answers about elections the way you'd treat directions from a stranger who's never visited your town: possibly interesting, definitely unverified.
