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Voting machines have long been at the center of conspiracy theories about U.S. elections. Now, Ben Adida and his nonprofit VotingWorks have built an open-source voting machine anyone can inspect, right down to its computer code. The idea is simple: make vote counting transparent. But making elections more transparent and making voters trust the results may be two very different things.

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You used to need a government-backed operation to spread election disinformation. Now a chatbot might do. Larry Norden of the Brennan Center put the major AI chatbots to the test: Could they create election fakes? Debunk them? Even recognize their own handiwork? The answers were not all reassuring.

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What if Russia didn’t have to convince you of anything new? What if it could simply exploit what you already believe? That’s the idea behind a Russian-linked disinformation network that hijacks real social media conversations to spread propaganda and influence U.S. elections. We follow the trail from celebrity rumors to Congress, and ask whether AI can spot the manipulation before it spreads.

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In Social Security’s database, a few keystrokes can turn a living person into a dead one. As part of a deportation scheme, DOGE pushed to do just that to 2.7 million people — without checking whether they were actually dead. Social Security whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield decided to stop them.

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Deepfakes are getting harder to spot. But digital forensics expert Hany Farid says the bigger problem isn’t just that AI can fool us. It’s that even when something is real, people may refuse to believe it. What happens when seeing is no longer believing—and the truth has a hard time catching up?

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