Q&A: Hey AI, who should I vote for this year?

MIT researchers led by Adam Berinsky, Chara Podimata and Charles Stewart III have built the LLM Election Observatory, a public dashboard that tracks in real time how popular AI chatbots answer a fixed set of questions about the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, re-running them every few days to see how responses vary by user location, party affiliation and identity. Podimata says early 2026 data show differences in how answers are presented, which sources are cited and tone, sometimes when the underlying facts are the same, though stability and effects on real users are not yet established. Berinsky warns that a confident-sounding chatbot is not necessarily accurate and says voters should treat its answers as a starting point rather than a final word.