Authors: Joel Sawyer, Netheena Mathews
Co-authors: Heidi Tworek, Chris Tenove
Technology is rapidly transforming democratic elections around the world. Developments ranging from increasingly sophisticated AI models to new digital voting systems have raised new questions about how to protect the core principles of democratic processes, while adapting elections to a digital age.
On September 10, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Electoral Integrity Project co-hosted the Technology and the Future of Democracy conference to assess the threats and opportunities posed to key democratic institutions in Canada and around the world. Over 70 attendees from academia, civil society, and policy practice gathered at UBC Robson Square to engage in training, tabletop exercises, and discussion. (Full program here.)
The conference sought to explore two main questions:
- How have new technologies impacted elections?
- Given those impacts, what should be done to enhance election participation and integrity?
To start the day, British Columbia’s Chief Electoral Officer, Anton Boegman, spoke of the need to be innovative and brave in how we confront the issue of technology and its impact on our democracies.
Photo credit: Netheena Mathews
Three major themes stood out during the rest of the day: the role of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI); other technological drivers of change such as cyberattacks; and the role of politicians and political parties in securing a democratic future.
Generative AI and the changing information ecosystem
Researchers and policy practitioners described how GenAI posed multifarious capabilities and challenges to the digital information ecosystem, ranging from partisan mobilization of Gen AI to changing social trust in institutions.
Tracy Weener and Ho-Chun Herbert Chang (Dartmouth College), for example, examined the affective power of GenAI in influencing voting behaviour in the United States. They found that the modality of an AI-generated political message (i.e. image, text, video) mattered less than the partisan salience of the political message. In other words, GenAI content would often reinforce existing voting behaviours for Democrats and Republicans. The exception was independents, who did demonstrate a ‘backfire’ response towards a liberal position when exposed to right-leaning messaging.
Other papers examined the need to establish stronger rulemaking and regulatory bodies to constrain GenAI’s more deleterious side effects. The University of Connecticut’s Robert Downes described the GenAI-enabled challenge to the co-constitutive pillars of democracy – contestation and inclusiveness – before calling for a proactive approach to align innovation in the AI space with democratic values and the public interest.
To further explore this theme, CSDI’s own Heidi Tworek and Chris Tenove led two tabletop exercises. Simulating a mock election interference scenario in the fictional nation of Cascadia, participants were challenged to develop (or in some cases, disrupt) a response to a technologically facilitated election threat. For more details, see Stress-Testing AI Threats to Elections: A Tabletop Exercise.
Technological drivers of change
Photo credit: Netheena Mathews
Conference participants also discussed technological developments beyond GenAI that are shaping elections. For instance, Maria Lindén, Sanna Salo, and Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs) described how algorithmic manipulation, ‘malign finance’, and other digital techniques contribute to the global trend towards illiberalism within democratically elected governments.
Andrea Lawlor (McMaster University) and Aiden McIlvaney (McGill University) examined policy responses to digitally-enabled election interference across the Canadian federal and provincial systems. They found that many election monitoring bodies were taking proactive approaches to addressing informational threats to election integrity, led by Elections Canada and Elections BC. However, fewer legislative changes had been made, particularly at the provincial levels, to address such threats.
Gabrielle Bardall (Université Saint Anne) presented findings on digital fundraising by women candidates in Canada in recent federal elections. Women candidates secured less direct funding (particularly if they ran as Conservatives), their social media and website content were less geared toward fundraising, and women donated less than men to candidates. Previous research showed women candidates tend to receive less political party support, and Bardall found that online fundraising has reproduced, rather than challenged, this inequity.
The Role of Politicians and Political Parties
Photo credit: Netheena Mathews
A final important theme to emerge during the conference was the role of politicians and political parties in shaping democratic processes through new technologies. Rafael Jerez Moreno (Technological Central American University), for example, discussed partisan control of electoral management bodies in Honduras, in particular the political contest over voter identification laws and policies. Moreno found that partisan contest and cartel politics scuppered the effective deployment of digital voter identification, leading to diminished voter power.
Other researchers brought a Canadian perspective to the question. Thomas Larochelle and Thierry Giasson (Université Laval) described a theory of cartel parties to explain new personal data management regulations in Quebec. They found that political parties had exploited legislative means to maintain privileged access to the personal information data of Quebec citizens, highlighting the importance of such data as a sought-after electoral resource. The pair invited those in attendance to reflect on a central tension: how political parties simultaneously legislate, self-regulate, and compete over the same rules that govern their own behaviour.
Overall, the day highlighted a range of issues affecting elections worldwide and underscored the importance of convening academics, practitioners, and civil society to explore, debate, and galvanize positive action on these topics.
Event Organizers and Partners
- Electoral Integrity Project
- Institute of Governmental Relations at Queen’s University
- Consortium on Electoral Democracy (CDEM)
- Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), UBC
- Elections British Columbia
- The Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO)
- Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership (HC2P)
- Media Smarts
- Apathy is Boring
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
