The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in electoral systems has brought about both historic opportunities and governance challenges to democratic systems across the world. While AI technologies enhance political activities and administration of elections, they also create a set of threats such as misinformation, data abuse, algorithm bias, and political influence. The paper has explored the intersection of AI, elections, and democratic integrity through the prism of the United Kingdom and the African political environment. The paper questions the impacts of disparities in regulatory capacity and political vulnerability on the way AI is shaping electoral governance using a qualitative and policy-analytical methodology. The United Kingdom is a developed regulatory environment that has incorporated data protection regimes, institutional controls and accountability processes to the citizens. On the other hand, several African countries are subjected to fragmented governance systems with low enforcement, ineffective distribution system and heightened political instability. Findings showed that AI is not a neutral technological tool in the election process. Instead, its impacts depend on institutional and regulatory capacity. The risks of AI are also reduced, but not eliminated, in the environment where the developed control systems are identified. Conversely, AI intensifies the politically vulnerable environments with less regulatory safeguards, increases misinformation, reinforces inequalities, and compromises the feeling of integrity in the election outcomes. The paper concludes that, maintaining democratic integrity in the AI age goes beyond technology adaptation, it however also requires institutional resilience, customizing the regulatory framework to institutional context, and inclusive global norm-setting. The paper sheds light on the governance asymmetry between the advanced and emerging political systems and adds to the current discussions of how AI should be governed and policy-related valuable information on how electoral resilience can be improved in various democracies.
Adebayo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.