Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

In the 2026 midterms, voters weighed in on AI: an NBC exit poll found 56% called AI and data centers a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress, and $100M+ in AI super PAC money did little to change that. On Reboot, Beth Simone Noveck spoke to Marketplace about how voters can use AI to interrogate their own thinking rather than let it decide for them; Elana Banin showcases Northeastern’s David Lazer’s Midterm Night Desk, which shows how large data sets can be repurposed at great speed to inform public decisions; and Luca Cominassi and Marco Bani argue Europe should decide who pays for, controls, and directs public AI. Also this week: AI chatbots in campaign texts, AI “slopaganda” in political ads, AI defending election infrastructure, and how well chatbots answer voters’ questions.

Midterm Night Desk, an experimental dashboard David Lazer built with Claude in a couple of hours, lets readers change the evidence behind an election forecast and watch the favorite flip. The tool shows how quickly data can become something people use. The research behind it shows why trustworthy forecasts still depend on carefully collected, sustained survey data.

After training more than 250,000 government workers through InnovateUS, the first Public Sector AI Observatory report, as featured by Fast Company and the Boston Globe, finds that confidence drives adoption. Beth Simone Noveck looks at South Australia, where a teacher-built tool cut writing assessments from 30 minutes to 52 seconds and saved an estimated 22,544 hours statewide. Also this month: Neil Kleiman on why government is falling behind on AI adoption, 2,702 Californians on how AI should be governed, a seven-organization report on bossware in California workplaces, and Anthropic’s disclosure that Georgia voter data was accessed without authorization while staff were using Claude.