Trusting AI With Elections: Gen Z Skips the Fact-Check

Heading into the 2026 midterms, American voters are drowning in election information and they know it. A new national survey released September 29, 2026 by Qlik finds that the channel voters use most is the one they trust least, while trusting AI with elections is already earning trust faster than voters are actually adopting it. According to the survey, fielded by Censuswide among two thousand registered voters from September 11 to September 15, the biggest surprise is not how much AI people use for election news. It is how little they question what it tells them, especially the youngest voters.

The most used source is the least trusted

Nearly half of voters, 48%, get election information from social media, more than any other source measured. Only 23% call social media trustworthy, a 25-point gap between use and trust that is the widest of any channel. The pattern fits a wider exhaustion: 36% of voters say they feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of election information they encounter, left to sort credible information from noise mostly on their own. Into that gap walks the chatbot: trusting AI with elections is becoming the quiet default.

Trust is running ahead of adoption

Only 11% of voters currently turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot for election information, yet 13% already name AI among their most trusted sources. The only other channel with trust running ahead of use is government or official election websites: 8% of voters go there, but 16% say they would trust them most. Trusting ai with elections is not a fringe habit anymore. It is a mainstream trust position waiting on adoption to catch up. The survey suggests trusting AI with elections will keep climbing whether voters adopt the tools on purpose or not.

Younger voters trust fastest and check least

The generation gap is stark. Gen Z voters are five times more likely than Baby Boomers to trust an AI explanation of election information without checking it elsewhere, 20% versus 4%. Gen Z also reports the heaviest information overload of any generation. According to the release, younger voters are both the heaviest users of AI for political information and the least likely to double-check what it tells them. The habit of trusting AI with elections is concentrated exactly where the skepticism used to live. For a generation raised on fact-check culture, trusting AI with elections without fact-checking breaks the pattern.

What voters actually ask AI to do

The number one use case is verification, which makes the low-verification finding stranger: 43% of voters say they would use AI to check whether a candidate's claim is true or misleading, ahead of comparing candidates' policy positions at 37% and summarizing a complex political issue at 32%. In practice, 39% say they would trust an AI explanation of a candidate or ballot measure but still check another source, while 14% would take it at face value. Voters also trust AI with their job more than their vote: 68% use AI tools regularly at work, but fewer than half have ever used AI to learn about a political issue or candidate, a twenty-point professional-to-civic gap. Even the voters who say they would use AI to verify claims are often trusting AI with elections in the casual, everyday sense.

A sharp gender split

Men and women approach AI in politics very differently. Men are sixteen points more likely than women to have used AI to research a candidate, issue or election, 55% to just under two in five. Women are far more likely to opt out entirely: 38% say they would never use AI for this, compared with 24% of men. That gap carries into trust itself, with one in five women rejecting AI for election information outright, against about one in seven men. The gender gap in trusting AI with elections is wide, and it starts early.

According to James Fisher, Qlik's chief strategy officer, voters are getting buried in information but not necessarily in trust, because the channels people rely on most are not the ones they believe most. He argues that trust has to be earned through transparency, so people know where an answer is coming from and can trust what it tells them. For voters already trusting AI with elections, the default setting is set.

Read as a whole, the survey describes an election information diet built on distrust. Voters scroll the feed they do not believe, and a growing share are trusting AI with elections in the same passive way, absorbing answers they will not verify. Gen Z is not the outlier here so much as the leading edge: the least trusting generation is learning, fastest, to trust the machine. Whether trusting AI with elections produces better-informed voters or just quieter ones will be tested soon enough, at the ballot box.

For more on how young people relate to AI they cannot quite trust, see The Real AI Campus Crisis Is AI Detection Anxiety, and for why the mechanics of power matter as much as the technology, see Pocket Rescission Lets the White House Erase Your Vote on Spending. The full Qlik survey release has the complete methodology and findings.