Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive groups are working to come up with novel ways to use AI to reach voters of color.
On Discord, a social messaging app that connects gamers, it takes the form of a smiling, artificially intelligent chatbot reminiscent of Pixar's animated robot “Wall-E,” which, when clicked, starts a conversation that reads, “This is the start of a legendary conversation with Vote-E.”
You can ask election questions like “How do I register to vote?” or “When is the deadline to register to vote in North Carolina?” and get answers almost instantly.
Vote-E is an experiment in solving one of the Democrats' toughest problems: reaching voters of color, especially young voters, and convincing them to vote Democratic using platforms where they actually spend their time. And it comes at a transformative yet uncertain time for the party, where Kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden as the top candidate and must use its existing infrastructure to beat Donald Trump.
NextGen America, which built Vote-E and is one of the largest youth voting organizations in the nation, says it makes the bot accessible to young men through the Discord chats and Twitch streams of Latino and Black gaming influencers.
“We see turnout gaps between black men and women, and Latino men and women,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, noting that while there's a focus on connecting with young people on college campuses, not everyone is there. The chatbot is up and running in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.
This is just one example of how progressive groups of color are experimenting with artificial intelligence that was not even on their radar four years ago. AI chatbots are now recruiting Latino voters through WhatsApp and Black voters through Facebook Messenger. They are using natural language processing to record voter-canvasser interactions and identify common concerns. They are also using it to index and identify Spanish-language-friendly sites to serve ads promoting the Democratic clean energy plan.
With just months to go until the election, the challenge facing Democrats is how to galvanize younger voters and voters of color.
More Latinos voted in 2020 than ever before, but as a share of the eligible voter population, Hispanics still lag behind white, Black, and Asian/Pacific Islander voters, according to Catalyst, a progressive data hub. This trend holds true across communities of color, which “have significantly higher rates of no voter turnout,” Catalyst noted.
Hector Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, told companies he was more interested in budgets and expertise in data, research and innovation than diversity budgets. That's why he hired Denise Cook, a Cuban-American former enterprise software architect who spent 16 years at IBM, as MFV's chief data and innovation officer. She leads an all-Latino team that has built its own chatbot and uses AI to have human-like, bilingual conversations with Latino voters on platforms like WhatsApp.
The group's campaign workers ask for permission to record conversations with voters on their phones or tablets. The conversations are then converted into data using natural language processing (a type of AI). This allows MFV to quickly outline voter priorities and determine whether they're best speaking to voters about the economy, reproductive rights, or the climate.
“We need this kind of brainpower to take on the greatest enemy our community has ever had,” Sanchez Barba said of Trump. “This is about using the most important technological advances, including artificial intelligence, for good and to save our democracy.”
Many leaders of color said they are aware of AI's pitfalls but are open to harnessing its power and experimenting with possible strategies. Larry Huynh, president of the American Association of Political Consultants and founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in incorporating AI into political campaigns that he has followed the lead of other industry leaders in forming a task force within his own company.
Huynh believes campaigns should follow the example of brands that use AI narration from celebrities and public figures to seamlessly convey their campaign message with natural mouth movements. Huynh's research shows that AI voices tailored to target demographics, such as young male speakers and young male voters, are more persuasive.
One example he gave was when a coalition group created a video targeting voters in Arizona and Nevada in which Harris spoke flawless Spanish in her own voice.
“If it's communicated well and doesn't seem strange or out of place, some voters may appreciate it being communicated in their own language,” he said.
But releasing a fully AI-made Harris into the public eye will draw intense scrutiny from within the party and from Republicans. Harris has already been the target of deepfakes that mimic her words and those that sexualize or degrade her. Another deepfake of her, even a positive one, could cause repercussions. Trump has said she used AI to fake crowds at her rallies. But her campaign photos were real. Concerns about disinformation have been heightened by the spread of AI-generated images of Trump being arrested in New York and AI robocalls that mimicked Biden's voice telling New Hampshire voters not to vote.
Still, progressive groups are pushing forward. Poder Latinx, an advocacy group that works to build Latino political power, created an ad touting the Biden administration's clean energy plan in the Reduce Inflation Act, timed to coincide with last month's popular Copa America soccer tournament. The group partnered with Mundial Media to help target the ad to U.S. Latinos who read Spanish-language news sites in places like Arizona. Mundial Media's Cadmus AI engine crawled the site and indexed keywords so soccer-themed clean energy ads could fit the page's content.
Yadira Sanchez, co-founder of Poder Latinx, was pleased with how the campaign reached voters and exceeded expectations with impressions and click-through rates from Latinos, including a 64% Hispanic male audience.
“We know that voter-to-voter contact is the best connection, and this technology complements the on-the-ground campaigning we already do,” she said. “Technology, and AI in particular, is perfect for reaching voters who are younger and more likely to vote online.”
But in an effort that would require a massive expansion of resources in time for November, AI may not be considered safe enough, and there are concerns that it could sway voters in the wrong circumstances.
In focus groups held in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia this year, BlackPac executive director Adrienne Shropshire found that black voters have “hesitation” when it comes to AI.
“People are concerned about what they're seeing and where exactly it's coming from,” she said, noting that voters “don't know what to trust and are suspicious and skeptical of everything.”
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, an organization that advocates for the rights of Black Americans and has a $25 million program for 2024, met with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and senior staff from Meta, Google, and Open AI to seek commitments about how AI will be used in election tools, which he said are not yet ready for primetime.
“Imagine if there were no regulations on cars and it was all about who could get a new car to market first,” he said, referring to Musk's Tesla, which has recalled its latest models four times. “It's like Tesla on steroids. At least the cars are recalled, but they don't have the infrastructure or the agency to recall the technology.”
Quentin James, founder and president of Collective Pac, a group that uses a Facebook Messenger chatbot to collect voter registration information to elect Black Democrats, said deepfakes and ads in which a campaign uses the likeness of an opponent to mislead voters must be stopped immediately.
Still, Democrats must be aggressive in using the tools at their disposal to defeat Trump because they know the other side has their eye on them, he said.
“We don't know if Federal Election Commission laws will catch up with this in the next few months, so we should use this to our advantage,” he said. “There's no way to control what the technology will do in this short time.”
