Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes looks on during an interview in November 2022 in Phoenix. Fontes told a conference of his peers this week that artificial intelligence carries benefits and risks for election officials. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
BILOXI, Miss. — Artificial intelligence carries the potential to improve voter outreach, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told state officials across the country this week, even as he also warned of its risks.
AI has exploded on the technology scene in recent years as chatbots and other tools are quickly integrated into everyday life. Like others, election officials are weighing the upsides and downsides the rapidly evolving field presents.
Fontes, a Democrat, described AI’s potential during a presentation at the National Association of Secretaries of State summer conference in Biloxi, Mississippi. The talk came after his office released a report on AI and election security in February.
“Don’t be afraid of it just because you might not understand it or you think you don’t understand it. Trust me, not a lot of people do very well. But we cannot avoid the conversation. It’s incredibly important,” Fontes told the conference audience Tuesday.
The winter report — developed by Fontes’ AI and Election Security Advisory Committee — says AI may help election officials share critical information with voters. AI could, for example, share details about races that will appear on a ballot and convenient voting locations.
The Arizona secretary of state’s chatbot conducted 655,000 “conversations” about the 2024 election, Fontes said. The top three questions to the bot from members of the public concerned early voting, the status of individual voters and in-person voting locations.
“Imagine the amount of staff time and energy and the number of lost communications for not answering phones, delayed responses that we could have had — we didn’t have those issues,” Fontes said.
At the same time, both Fontes and the report warn that AI risks supercharging cyberattacks on election officials and undercutting confidence in elections. In 2023, Fontes used an AI-generated deepfake video of himself to welcome election officials to a training on AI-based attacks, underscoring how the tech can be weaponized to sow confusion.
Cyberattacks — traditional and AI-fueled — remain a significant concern of election officials. As recently as June, hackers changed candidate photos on the Arizona Secretary of State’s website to an image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 revolution in Iran.
President Donald Trump has curtailed federal election security work in recent months. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, in March halted its election security work. A month earlier, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force also fired 130 cybersecurity workers at the agency.
Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at [email protected].
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