--- title: States Scramble to Block AI Election Meddling description: Bills regulating AI-generated content have largely been met with bipartisan support canonical: https://time.com/6969563/states-are-racing-to-pass-ai-bills-before-the-2024-election/ author: Vera Bergengruen article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-04-23T17:47:25.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:29.169Z article:section: Politics og:title: States Scramble to Block AI Election Meddling og:description: Bills regulating AI-generated content have largely been met with bipartisan support og:url: https://time.com/6969563/states-are-racing-to-pass-ai-bills-before-the-2024-election/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8546b82f2feb46ec/698a55d916d884da12c3e8f6/voting-ai-elections-laws.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: voting-ai-elections-laws og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: States Scramble to Block AI Election Meddling twitter:description: Bills regulating AI-generated content have largely been met with bipartisan support twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8546b82f2feb46ec/698a55d916d884da12c3e8f6/voting-ai-elections-laws.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # States Race To Counter AI Fakes Before the 2024 Election > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=ed18b936-7f30-433e-83e9-2c124b09b2a1&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How AI May Meddle With The Election Year [Watch (HLS stream): How AI May Meddle With The Election Year](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Pe8KJmwX.m3u8) (4:21)  _Published 2024-02-23. The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. Experts on AI explain how it may meddle with the 2024 election._  by [Vera Bergengruen](https://time.com/author/vera-bergengruen/)  ## Vera Bergengruen Apr 23, 2024 5:47 PM UTC  Photo-Illustration by TIME; Getty Images  by [Vera Bergengruen](https://time.com/author/vera-bergengruen/)  ## Vera Bergengruen Apr 23, 2024 5:47 PM UTC New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver was at a conference on election security last year when she had what she describes as an "oh crap, this is happening" moment. The potential for AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes to disrupt this year’s national elections was the "hottest topic among election administrators" at the event, Toulouse Oliver says, with one terrifying scenario unfolding after another in conversations. As her state’s top election official, she realized time was running out to set up New Mexico’s defenses ahead of this year’s vote. “That was really my wake-up call,” she says. Thanks in part to that epiphany, New Mexico [enacted a new law ](https://azleg.gov/legtext/56leg/2R/bills/SB1359S.pdf)last month requiring political campaigns to disclose whenever they use AI in their ads, and making it a crime to use AI-generated content to intentionally deceive voters. The focus on “malicious intent” was key, says Toulouse Oliver. "We're cognizant of the First Amendment and we don't want to unfairly penalize folks," she says. These new measures will go hand-in-hand with a new public campaign to raise awareness about AI content targeting voters, which will incorporate TV, radio, billboards and a digital campaign. Toulouse Oliver’s efforts are part of a larger trend. Skeptical that the federal government and social media companies will impose significant guardrails on AI content ahead of November's election, state and local officials have moved quickly to take matters into their own hands. More than 100 bills have recently been introduced or passed in 39 state legislatures that contain provisions to restrict the potential for AI-altered or generated election disinformation, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks voting legislation. "2024 is the first American presidential election year at the intersection of this heightened election-related mis- and disinformation, and the rapid growth of AI-generated content," says Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at Voting Rights Lab. This year's elections, not only in the U.S., but across the world, will serve as a test case of the impact of widely available new generative AI tools, which have made it cheaper, faster and easier than ever before to mass produce altered content. Facing a potential avalanche of voting-related disinformation, state lawmakers have grappled with a variety of approaches to shield voters or penalize those who create and disseminate this content while balancing First Amendment and other legal protections. With regulation of AI content in its early stages, experts say some of the language in the new bills is legally ambiguous and may be hard to enforce. **_Read More:_** [**_Hackers Could Use ChatGPT to Target 2024 Elections_**](https://time.com/6717129/hackers-ai-2024-elections/) "AI-generated content...targeted strategically because of our election landscape could still do significant damage," says Bellamy, noting some states may feel the impact more than others. "AI-generated content is created to grab voters’ attention, and that alone could lead to chaos and confusion even if there are efforts to try to mitigate the harm." Many of these laws, like New Mexico’s, focus on transparency by requiring disclosures about the use of AI in election-related content. The Florida legislature passed a similar bill in March, requiring a disclaimer on political ads noting that they were "created in whole or in part with the use of generative artificial intelligence." This applies to all content, including audio, video, text, images or other graphics. (The bill is still awaiting Gov. Ron DeSantis' signature). Many bills also seek to penalize those who use AI tools to intentionally spread misleading content. A bill signed by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers last month imposes a $1000 fine on any group affiliated with a political campaign that fails to add a disclaimer to AI-created or altered content, although it's less restrictive as it does not address disinformation spread by groups that are not tied to campaigns. In Arizona, lawmakers have been debating several approaches, including a bill that would allow candidates for public office to sue the creators of "digital impersonations" created without their consent. For many state officials, last year's widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other popular AI tools was a wake-up call to the destructive potential the programs could have on the upcoming elections. "The big leap forward with ChatGPT really got people talking in a way they hadn't before about the many applications of AI and what aspects of our national life are particularly vulnerable," says Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. "AI is not a new and independent threat in and of itself, but it is a means to amplify existing threats in a way we wouldn't even have thought seriously about five years ago." In the spring of 2023, Minnesota became one of the first states to ban the use of AI-generated content in election materials. The new statute prohibits the dissemination of such content if it is created with the intent of hurting a candidate within 90 days of an election. It also criminalizes the dissemination of AI-generated content like deepfakes without the consent of the person depicted. As part of his efforts, Simon has held election security trainings with officials from all of the state's 50 counties, which includes a focus on combating and educating voters about AI-generated content. ### More from TIME "I'm cautiously optimistic about our ability to neutralize its effects," says Simon. Minnesota's new law "is serving notice not just to people who disseminate this, but to the public as well that this is something worth watching and paying attention to." While the terms "misinformation" and "disinformation" have become heavily politicized since the 2020 election, with many conservative lawmakers reflexively opposing legislation seeking to curb the spread of false information related to voting, state officials say that bills related to AI-generated content have largely been met with bipartisan support. "Very interestingly, there was very little pushback to the legislation," says Simon. Despite the flurry of new bills, state officials say they know these efforts are a drop in the bucket. It can take a few clicks to create AI-generated content that reaches millions, and days or weeks to verify and track it down. Many officials say that in tandem with legislative efforts, they have been spending significant resources on public awareness campaigns meant to increase voters' skepticism of and resilience to manipulated content, and to raise the visibility of accurate information about the voting process. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs says he has watched closely as AI-generated content has drastically improved in recent years—first with fascination, then with deepening alarm. There was the fake but convincing Richard Nixon created by MIT researchers admitting to a failed moon landing, a fake President Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering during the start of Russia's invasion in 2022, and, more recently, a fake President Joe Biden telling New Hampshire voters not to vote in the primaries. "I was looking at the feds going, 'Man, I really hope they do something,'” Hobbs says. “But they weren't. So we did it at the state level." It took two years, but last May Washington's state legislature[ passed a law](https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2023-24/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/Senate/5152-S.E%20SBR%20FBR%2023.pdf?q=20240123113913) that requires advertisers to disclose when election-related material is created or altered by AI, and allows candidates targeted by AI-altered content to sue for damages. Hobbs sees it as a small but necessary step, but notes that the law does little to protect against election manipulation by state actors or foreign entities: "I wanted to do more." His counterparts agree the challenges remain considerable. "I'm not going to pretend that regulating this is going to be easy, it's a whole new area," says Toulouse Oliver, the New Mexico Secretary of State, adding that she hopes at least the new measures will help catch the worst violators as the election season progresses. "We're in a brave new world." ## Transcript 2024 is going to be the first AI election that we've had in the United States and we should expect that there will be attempts to use AI to attack our election infrastructure to further poison the information environment. The 2024 election will be more risky than before because of artificial intelligence its own President Polk's are very focused on RD pics and you fix could be used to make it look like candidates are other officials are staying something that they never said. We've already had that other countries elections in Slovakia. We saw a debate audio used against one of the candidates in the weekend before the election. And now we have a lot of the power generated by a generator internet and social media are filled with AI generated content in done because of the way those content is generated by AI. Call it was have certain biases. The biases will manifest in those content in previous elections would do see sociopaths. We're used to spread misinformation. There are concerns that they make it easier for Bad actors to fool election workers by imitating a people who work in elections in a phone call or in an email and getting election workers to provide information that they shouldn't be providing voter. Suppression is another area where I think people are worried that day. I made may be helpful. We have a history in the Uso robocalls being used to confuse voters about went about social media being used by false information. So maybe that voters don't show up or are scared to vote. I am worried that a I may become yet another one. That the dangers of AI and then start to believe that AI has taken over our elections or maybe rely on a i to give them information. I used all of the main commercial chat box and ask them questions about the elections in different states to test them and all of them provided some wrong information a little bit of a flip side. I think it's really important but would say something called the wires dividend if you think back to the 2012 election, which was Romney vs. Obama or the 2016 election, which was Trump versus Hillary Clinton in both of those cases. There were audios that leaps of one of the major candidates, you know, she was down in Palm Beach. If something like that comes out in the future that is legitimate. It's going to be easier for candidates to deny that a video or audio of them is actually real It's critical to stop double check yourself and and do research to find out whether or not what you're seeing on social media is accurate a lot of election officials and other politicians on social media have been verified the watermarking and requiring some kind of authentication of video audio images that appear on social media and long-term Year all of the security measures that we talked about that we need to put in place to defend our elections. 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