Generative AI in Electoral Campaigns: Mapping Global Patterns

This Summary for Policymakers provides a high-level précis of the Technical Paper, The Role of Generative AI Use in 2024 Elections Worldwide.

GenAI is being deployed in many ways during elections, ranging from the creation of deepfake video and audio messages, to sophisticated voter targeting. What are the implications of GenAI for election administration and voter participation around the world? This assessment delivers the first global, data-driven analysis of its kind, designed to inform policy recommendations that enhance election administration, foster trust in electoral processes, and boost voter turnout.

Based on an analysis of an original data set of 215 incidents, covering all 50 countries holding competitive national elections in 2024, we find that:

• Fully four-fifths (80%) of the countries holding elections in 2024 had GenAI incidents.  
• The vast majority (90%) of incidents involved content creation, such as audio messages, images, videos, and social media posts.
• Almost half of the incidents have no known source (46%), a quarter were produced by political candidates and parties (25%), a fifth were produced by foreign actors (20%), and the remainder came from other sources (9%).
• More than two-thirds (69%) of the incidents were described as having a harmful role in the election.