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Many US election deniers have spent the previous three years inundating native election officers with paperwork and submitting 1000’s of Freedom of Info Act requests as a way to floor supposed cases of fraud. “I’ve had election officers telling me that in an workplace the place there’s one or two employees, they actually had been satisfying public data requests from 9 to five every single day, after which it is 5 o’clock and they’d shift to their regular election duties,” says Tammy Patrick, CEO of the Nationwide Affiliation of Election Officers. “And that is untenable.”
In Washington state, elections officers had been receiving so many FOIA requests following the 2020 presidential elections in regards to the state’s voter registration database that the legislature needed to change the regulation, rerouting these requests to the Secretary of State’s workplace to alleviate the burden on native elections employees.
“Our county auditors got here in and testified as to how a lot time having to reply to public data requests was taking,” says democratic state senator Patty Kederer, who cosponsored the laws. “It could value some huge cash to course of these requests. And a few of these smaller counties would not have the manpower to deal with them. You can simply overwhelm a few of our smaller counties.”
Now, consultants and analysts fear that with generative AI, election deniers may mass-produce FOIA requests at a good better fee, drowning the election employees legally obligated to answer to them in paperwork and gumming up the electoral course of. In a essential election yr, when elections workers are facing increasing threats and systems are more strained than ever, consultants who spoke to WIRED shared issues that governments are unprepared to defend in opposition to election deniers, and generative AI corporations lack the guardrails needed to stop their programs from being abused by individuals trying to decelerate election employees.
Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot can simply generate FOIA requests, even right down to referencing state-level legal guidelines. This might make it simpler than ever for individuals to flood native elections officers with requests and make it more durable for them to ensure elections run nicely and easily, says Zeve Sanderson, director of New York College’s Middle for Social Media and Politics.
“We all know that FOIA requests have been utilized in dangerous religion beforehand in quite a lot of totally different contexts, not simply elections, and that [large language models] are actually good at doing stuff like writing FOIAs,” says Sanderson. “At instances, the purpose of the data requests themselves appear to have been that they require work to reply to. If somebody is working to reply to a data request, they don’t seem to be working to do different issues like administering an election.”
WIRED was in a position to simply generate FOIA requests for quite a lot of battleground states, particularly requesting data on voter fraud utilizing Meta’s LLAMA 2, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Within the FOIA created by Copilot, the generated textual content asks about voter fraud in the course of the 2020 elections, though WIRED supplied solely a generic immediate, and didn’t ask for something associated to 2020. The textual content additionally included the precise e-mail and mailing addresses to which the FOIA requests may very well be despatched.
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