While there will be more elections this year where AI could have an effect, the United States being one likely to attract particular attention, the trend observed thus far is unlikely to change. AI is being used to try to influence electoral processes, but these efforts have not been fruitful. Commenting on the upcoming US election, Meta's latest Adversarial Threat Report acknowledged that AI was being used to meddle--for example, by Russia-based operations--but that "GenAI-powered tactics provide only incremental productivity and content-generation gains" to such "threat actors." This echoes comments from the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, who earlier this year stated that "it is striking how little these tools have been used on a systematic basis to really try to subvert and disrupt the elections." Far from being dominated by AI-enabled catastrophes, this election "super year" at that point was pretty much like every other election year.

The Indian government has asked tech companies to seek its explicit nod before publicly launching "unreliable" or "under-tested" generative AI models or tools. It has also warned companies that their AI products should not generate responses that "threaten the integrity of the electoral process" as the country gears up for a national vote. The Indian government's efforts to regulate artificial intelligence represent a walk-back from its earlier stance of a hands-off approach when it informed Parliament in April 2023 that it was not eyeing any legislation to regulate AI. The advisory was issued last week by India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) briefly after Google's Gemini faced a right-wing backlash for its response over a query: 'Is Modi a fascist?' It responded that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was "accused of implementing policies some experts have characterised as fascist", citing his government's "crackdown on dissent and its use of violence against religious minorities".

Gemini, Google's AI chatbot, won't answer questions about India's upcoming national elections, the company wrote in a blog post today. "Out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we have begun to roll out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," the company wrote. The restrictions are similar to the ones Google announced in December ahead of global elections in the US and the EU. "As we shared last December, in preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we're restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a Google spokesperson wrote to Engadget. The guardrails are already in place in the US. When I asked Gemini for interesting facts about the 2024 US presidential election, it replied, "I'm still learning how to answer this question.

Nepal will hold national and provincial elections on Sunday, which the ruling coalition, led by the centrist Nepali Congress party, is expected to win. About 18 million people are eligible to vote for the 275-member parliament, as well as the 550 members of seven provincial assemblies through a mix of first past the post and the proportional representation system. Here are key issues that will determine how the Nepalis vote. The economy of the Himalayan nation, wedged between Asian giants China and India, is slowing down, hit by rising energy and food prices, monetary tightening and fears of a global recession. The $38bn economy is expected to expand 4.7 percent in the current fiscal year starting in mid-July, according to Asian Development Bank (ADB), down from the previous year's estimate of 5.8 percent.

In developing countries especially Liberia, when elections are held, voters' decisions are never based on or guided by any solid intelligence or knowledge about the candidate or his/her policies. In fact, it is a common phenomenon to see citizens base their voting decisions on factors such as: the candidate's popularity, political affiliation, ethnic or religious values, emotions, tribalism, political rhetoric, candidate's educational background, or the amount of money (aka CASH VIOLENCE), that the candidate spends on them (voters). Arguably, this could be attributed to poverty and illiteracy. And so, candidates especially politicians, take advantage of these social and economic challenges, to campaign using lies, empty promises and commitments which they cannot fulfill after winning elections. When this happens, voters would have to wait for those elected officials to complete their tenure, before getting another opportunity to vote for a new group of leaders in hopes that "GOD" might send them better leaders, if not a messiah. Because of this, many nations remain underdeveloped, poor, and heavily dependent on international aid.

Deciding the outcome of an election when voters have provided only partial orderings over their preferences requires voting rules that accommodate missing data. While existing techniques, including considerable recent work, address missingness through circumvention, we propose the novel application of conventional machine learning techniques to predict the missing components of ballots via latent patterns in the information that voters are able to provide. We show that suitable predictive features can be extracted from the data, and demonstrate the high performance of our new framework on the ballots from many real world elections, including comparisons with existing techniques for voting with partial orderings. Our technique offers a new and interesting conceptualization of the problem, with stronger connections to machine learning than conventional social choice techniques.