Democrats use AI in effort to stay ahead with Latino and Black voters

Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive organizations are mobilizing to come up with novel uses of AI to reach voters of color.

On Discord, a social messaging app that connects gamers, it’s taking the form of a smiling chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that evokes Pixar’s animated robot Wall-E. When you click, a conversation opens up that says: “This is the very beginning of your legendary conversation with Vote-E.”

You can ask election related questions such as “How do I register to vote?” or when North Carolina’s voter registration deadline is – and the answers are almost instantaneous.

Vote-E is an experiment in how to crack one of the toughest problems for Democrats – reaching voters of color, especially younger ones, using platforms where they actually spend time, and persuading them to vote for Democrats. And it comes at a transformative, but uncertain time for the party, with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, who must use existing infrastructure to beat Donald Trump.

NextGen America, which built Vote-E and is one of the nation’s largest youth voter organizations, says it allows young men to access the bot from Discord chats and Twitch streams of Latino and Black gaming influencers.

“We’re seeing voter turnout gaps between Black men and women and Latino men and women,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, NextGen America’s president, noting that while there’s a focus on connecting with young people on college campuses, not everyone is there. The chatbot is active in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.

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It’s just one example of progressive groups of color experimenting with artificial intelligence which wasn’t on their radar four years ago: AI chatbots are now also recruiting Latino voters from WhatsApp and Black voters from Facebook Messenger; they’re using natural language processing to record voter interactions with canvassers and identify shared concerns; and even using it to index and identify friendly Spanish-language sites to place an ad touting Democrats’ clean energy plan.

With the election mere months away, the challenge facing Democrats remains how to galvanize younger voters and voters of color.

While more Latinos turned out in 2020 than ever before, Hispanics still lag behind white, Black, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters as a proportion of their population of eligible voters, according to Catalist , a progressive data hub, which noted this is true across communities of color, “where non-voting rates are substantially higher”.

Héctor Sánchez Barba, the president and chief executive of Mi Familia Vota, told companies he was less interested in their diversity dollars than in their budgets and expertise in the realm of data, research, and innovation. It’s why he recruited Denise Cook, a Cuban American former enterprise software architect who spent 16 years at IBM to join MFV as its chief data and innovation officer. She leads an all-Latina team, which created its own chatbot and uses AI to have human-sounding, bilingual conversations with Latino voters on platforms like WhatsApp.

Canvassers with the group ask for permission to record conversations with voters on their mobile phones or tablets. Those interactions are then turned into data using natural language processing, a type of AI. This way, MFV is able to quickly summarize voter priorities and figure out if it is speaking about the economy, reproductive rights or climate optimally to voters.

“We need this kind of brainpower when we’re fighting the biggest enemy our community has ever had,” Sánchez Barba said of Trump. “This is about using the most important technological advancements, including artificial intelligence, for good and to save our democracy.”

Many leaders of color said they are mindful of pitfalls around AI but open to harnessing its power and testing possible strategies. Larry Huynh, the president of the American Association of Political Consultants and the founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in incorporating AI into political campaigns that he followed leaders in other industries by creating an internal taskforce at his company.

He believes campaigns should follow the lead of brands, which use AI voiceovers of celebrities and public figures, to have their natural mouth movements seamlessly disseminate campaign messages. Huynh’s research has found AI voices tailored to their target audience – young male speaker, young male voter, say – appear to be more persuasive.

One example he gave is of an allied group creating a video of the candidate – now Harris – speaking perfect Spanish in her own voice aimed at Arizona or Nevada voters.

“If it’s well-delivered and it doesn’t seem odd or off, some voters could appreciate that communication in their predominant language,” he said.

Putting out a wholly AI-made Harris, however, would be highly scrutinized both from within the party and by Republicans. Harris is already a target of deepfakes that put words in her mouth as well as ones meant to sexualize and demean her. Yet another deepfake of her, even a positive one, could strike the wrong chord. A Trump has said she used AI to fake a huge rally crowd. The photo of her campaign stop was real, though. Concerns over disinformation have only been heightened by the spread of AI-generated images of Trump getting arrested in New York and an AI robocall that mimicked Biden’s voice telling New Hampshire voters not to cast a ballot.

Related: Can Kamala Harris win over disenchanted Latino voters?

Still, progressive groups are charging forward. Poder Latinx, an advocacy group committed to building Latino political power, created an ad touting the clean energy plan from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. It was timed to coincide with the popular Copa América soccer tournament last month. Partnering with Mundial Media, the group was able to serve the ad to US Latinos reading Spanish-language news sites in places like Arizona. Mundial Media’s Cadmus AI engine crawled the sites and indexed their keywords to make sure the soccer-themed clean energy ad would fit in with the content on the pages.

Yadira Sanchez, the co-founder of Poder Latinx, was happy with how the campaign reached voters, over-delivering impressions and click-thru rates from Latinos, including finding a 64% Hispanic male audience.

“We know that the best connection is voter to voter contact. This technology is complementing the on-the-ground canvassing we are already using,” she said. “Technology, AI in particular, is great to reach younger, more online voters.“

But AI may not be viewed as safe enough for initiatives that require serious resources to scale up in time for November. And there are concerns it could freak out voters in the wrong context.

In focus groups in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia this year, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPac, found “hesitation” from Black voters around AI.

“There’s a concern people have with what they’re seeing and where it’s coming from exactly,” she said, noting voters “don’t know what to trust and are suspicious and skeptical of everything.”

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a group that advocates for Black Americans and has a $25m program for 2024, has met with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, alongside senior staff at Meta, Google and OpenAI, to call for commitments on how AI will be used around election tools, which he says aren’t ready for primetime.

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“Imagine if there were no regulations for cars and it was all about who could get their new vehicle to market fastest?” he said, citing Musk’s Tesla, which has recalled its latest model four times . “It’s Tesla on steroids. At least cars get recalled, but there is no infrastructure or body that recalls tech.”

Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Pac, a group that works to elect Black Democrats and is using the Facebook Messenger chatbot to get registration information from voters, stressed that deepfakes or ads where one campaign is using the likeness of their opponent to mislead voters should be shut down immediately.

Still, he said, Democrats must be willing to use the tools at their disposal to beat Trump, because the other side will be looking at them as well.

“I don’t know if FEC law can catch up to this in a few months, so we should use it to our advantage,” he said. “There’s no way we can control what happens with technology in this short time period.”