In their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship, Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier explore how artificial intelligence is undermining the world’s confidence in how we receive information and harming democracies across the globe.
Artificial intelligence has become intertwined in our world, and its impact cannot be understated. The democracies of the world are believed to be worse off for it, according to the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg. Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the event for the Guardian, as well as the impact AI will have on our democracies.
The two recently published their book as well, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship, where they explore both sides of the risks and opportunities that AI can bring to the democracies that exist across the globe.
One of their biggest points is that AI is “undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies, and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power.”
Sanders and Schneier wanted to ensure they delivered the full realm of possibilities when it comes to AI’s integration into world politics, as there have already been instances of it being utilized to make democracy “better.”
“Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.”
Sanders and Schneier wrote about four international ways in which AI is being used to make democracy more “responsive to people,” for the publication.
The two cited Japan’s governor race for Tokyo last year, where Takahiro Anno, a 33-year-old engineer, ended up in fifth out of 56 candidates. His higher ranking has been partially credited to the use of an authorized AI avatar that would answer 8,600 questions from voters during a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream. This campaign technique has been recognized around the world as a potential tool for distributing information to voters.
Also in Japan, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, and used AI to engage constituents and answer over 20,000 questions throughout the election.
Sanders and Schneier reported that Anno-san’s new party, “Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan’s public funding for political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to organize those expressions using AI.
The party promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input,” they wrote.
In Brazil, AI is being utilized to help facilitate lawful processes. The courts throughout the nation are overwhelmed with cases and backlog costs, so they’ve adopted AI to help automate procedures throughout its judiciary.
“AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in 2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years,” Sanders and Schneier reported.
“A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps: amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and facilitate engagement between government and the public.”
Germany has also utilized AI to provide guides and answers to voters. Since 2002, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education has operated a non-partisan voting guide known as Wahl-o-Mat. Within the past two years, outside groups have provided alternatives that use AI. The Technical University of Munich released an interactive AI system called Wahl.chat that was used by over 150,000 people within four months.
Citizens can use the tool to engage in interactive conversations to gather information that is personalized regarding elections.
“Finally, the US – in particular, California, home to CalMatters, a non-profit, nonpartisan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been collecting every public utterance of California elected officials – every floor speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting records, legislation, and campaign contributions – and making all that information available in a free online platform,” the two authors reported.
These four nations provide examples of how AI is helping to make democracy stronger.
“In all four cases, it is being used to assist people performing their democratic tasks – politics in Japan, litigation in Brazil, voting in Germany and watchdog journalism in California – rather than replacing them.
In none of these cases is the AI doing something that humans can’t perfectly competently do. But in all of these cases, we don’t have enough available humans to do the jobs on their own. A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps: amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and facilitate engagement between government and the public.
One of the barriers towards realizing this vision more broadly is the AI market itself. The core technologies are largely being created and marketed by US tech giants. We don’t know the details of their development: on what material they were trained, what guardrails are designed to shape their behavior, what biases and values are encoded into their systems. And, even worse, we don’t get a say in the choices associated with those details or how they should change over time. In many cases, it’s an unacceptable risk to use these for-profit, proprietary AI systems in democratic contexts.
AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance democracy. It’s up to us to steer the technology in that better direction,” Sanders and Schneier concluded.
To read more about Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier’s analysis of AI use in political democratic spheres throughout the world, read their full article by clicking here!
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
