constitutional right
FlockVote: LLM-Empowered Agent-Based Modeling for Simulating U.S. Presidential Elections
Zhou, Lingfeng, Xu, Yi, Wang, Zhenyu, Wang, Dequan
Modeling complex human behavior, such as voter decisions in national elections, is a long-standing challenge for computational social science. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) are limited by oversimplified rules, while large-scale statistical models often lack interpretability. We introduce FlockVote, a novel framework that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to build a "computational laboratory" of LLM agents for political simulation. Each agent is instantiated with a high-fidelity demographic profile and dynamic contextual information (e.g. candidate policies), enabling it to perform nuanced, generative reasoning to simulate a voting decision. We deploy this framework as a testbed on the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, focusing on seven key swing states. Our simulation's macro-level results successfully replicate the real-world outcome, demonstrating the high fidelity of our "virtual society". The primary contribution is not only the prediction, but also the framework's utility as an interpretable research tool. FlockVote moves beyond black-box outputs, allowing researchers to probe agent-level rationale and analyze the stability and sensitivity of LLM-driven social simulations.
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania (0.06)
- North America > United States > Wisconsin (0.05)
- North America > United States > Nevada (0.05)
- (7 more...)
- Questionnaire & Opinion Survey (0.92)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.67)
The ACLU Fights for Your Constitutional Right to Make Deepfakes
You wake up on Election Day and unlock your phone to a shaky video of your state capitol. In other clips posted alongside it, gunshots ring out in the distance. You think to yourself: Maybe better to skip the polling booth today. Only later do you learn that the videos were AI forgeries. A friend calls you, distraught.