Latino and Black-led Democratic and progressive organizations are mobilizing to devise new uses of AI to reach voters of color.
On Discord, a social messaging app that connects gamers, it takes the form of a smiling, AI-powered chatbot reminiscent of Pixar’s animated robot Wall-E. When you click, it opens a conversation that reads: “This is the beginning of your legendary conversation with Vote-E.”
You can ask questions about elections, like, “How do I register to vote?” or when is the voter registration deadline in North Carolina. You’ll get answers almost immediately.
Vote-E is an experiment in cracking one of the toughest problems for Democrats: reaching voters of color, especially younger ones, on platforms they actually spend time with, and convincing them to vote Democratic. And it comes at a transformative but uncertain moment for the party, with Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, who must leverage existing infrastructure to defeat Donald Trump.
NextGen America, which founded Vote-E and is one of the country’s largest youth voter organizations, says it is giving young men access to the bot through Discord chats and Twitch streams of Latino and Black gaming influencers.
“We see disparities in turnout between Black men and women and Hispanic men and women,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, who noted that while there is 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 that wouldn’t have been on their radar four years ago: AI chatbots are now recruiting Hispanic voters on WhatsApp and Black voters on Facebook Messenger. They’re using natural language processing to capture voter-to-voter interactions and identify shared concerns. They’re even using it to index and identify Spanish-friendly websites so they can run an ad touting the Democrats’ clean energy plan.
With the election just months away, Democrats face the challenge of mobilizing younger voters and voters of color.
While more Latinos turned out in 2020 than ever before, Hispanics still lag behind white, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander voters as a percentage of their eligible voting population, according to Catalist, a progressive data hub, which noted that this is true for communities of color, “where non-voting rates are significantly higher.”
Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, told companies he was less interested in their diversity dollars than in their budgets and expertise in data, research and innovation. So he recruited Denise Cook, a Cuban-American former enterprise software architect who spent 16 years at IBM, to join MFV as head of data and innovation. She leads an all-Latin American team that has created its own chatbot and uses AI to have human-sounding, bilingual conversations with Latin American voters on platforms like WhatsApp.
Recruiters with the group ask permission to record conversations with voters on their mobile phones or tablets. These interactions are then converted into data using natural language processing, a type of AI. In this way, MFV can quickly summarize voters’ priorities and determine whether it is optimally speaking to voters about the economy, reproductive rights or the climate.
“We need this kind of brainpower as we fight the greatest enemy our society has ever faced,” Sánchez 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’re aware of the pitfalls surrounding AI but are open to harnessing its power and testing potential strategies. Larry Huynh, the president of the American Association of Political Consultants and the founder of Trilogy Interactive, is so interested in integrating AI into political campaigns that he’s followed leaders in other industries by launching an internal task force at his firm.
He believes campaigns should follow the lead of brands, who are using AI voiceovers of celebrities and public figures to seamlessly convey campaign messages through their natural mouth movements. Huynh’s research has shown that AI voices that are tailored to their target audience – young male speakers, young male voters, for example – appear to be more persuasive.
One example he gave was of an allied group that made a video of the candidate – now Harris – speaking perfect Spanish in her own voice, targeting voters in Arizona or Nevada.
“If it’s delivered well and doesn’t seem strange or off, some voters may appreciate that communication in their predominant language,” he said.
However, launching an entirely AI-created Harris would draw intense scrutiny from both within the party and from Republicans. Harris has already been targeted by deepfakes that put words in her mouth, as well as deepfakes intended to sexualize and denigrate her. Another deepfake of her, even a positive one, could strike the wrong chord. Trump has said she used AI to fake a massive crowd. The photo of her campaign stop, however, was real. Concerns about misinformation have only grown with the spread of AI-generated images of Trump being arrested in New York and an AI robocall that imitated Biden’s voice telling voters in New Hampshire not to cast ballots.
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Still, progressive groups are pushing ahead. Poder Latinx, an advocacy group dedicated to building Latin American political power, created an ad touting the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act clean energy plan. The ad was timed to coincide with last month’s popular Copa América soccer tournament. By partnering with Mundial Media, the group was able to show the ad to Latinos in the U.S. who read Spanish-language news sites in places like Arizona. Mundial Media’s Cadmus AI engine crawled the sites and indexed their keywords to ensure the soccer-themed clean energy ad would fit with the content on the pages.
Yadira Sanchez, co-founder of Poder Latinx, was pleased with how the campaign reached voters, generating more impressions and click-through rates from Latinos, including a 64% Hispanic male audience.
“We know the best connection is voter-to-voter contact. This technology complements the canvassing on the ground that we already do,” she said. “Technology, especially AI, is great for reaching younger, more online voters.”
But AI may not be seen as safe enough for initiatives that need serious resources to scale up before November. And there are concerns it could scare voters in the wrong context.
During focus groups in Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia this year, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPac, found that black voters are “hesitant” about 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 about everything.”
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a black advocacy group with a $25 million program for 2024, has spoken with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, along with senior executives from Meta, Google and OpenAI. He called for commitments on how AI will be used in election tools, which he said are not yet ready for widespread use.
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“Imagine if there were no rules for cars and it was just about who could get their new vehicle to market the fastest?” he said, referring to Musk’s Tesla, which has recalled its latest model four times. “It’s Tesla on steroids. At least cars are being recalled, but there’s no infrastructure or agency that does the technology recalls.”
Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Pac, a group that advocates for the election of Black Democrats and uses Facebook Messenger’s chatbot to obtain voter registration data, stressed that deepfakes, or ads in which a campaign uses the likeness of an opponent to mislead voters, should be shut down immediately.
Still, Democrats must be willing to use the tools at their disposal to defeat Trump, he said, because the other side will be looking to them, too.
“I don’t know if the FEC law can keep up with this in a few months, so we have to use it to our advantage,” he said. “There’s no way we can control what happens with technology in this short period of time.”
