AI and fake respondents are messing with polls

Polls used to call your landline. Now they text, email, even drop voicemails from bots that sound like your tía. Courtney Kennedy at Pew says AI is flooding surveys with fake responses — robots pretending to be real people answering questions about voting, healthcare, and who they’ll support in November.

The problem? These bots don’t get tired. They don’t have kids to pick up from school or a double shift at the warehouse. They answer every survey, every time, fast and perfect — and they’re skewing the data.

Meanwhile, real people are dropping out. Older folks don’t answer unknown numbers. Younger folks ignore texts from "SurveyUSA." Those who do respond? Often the ones with time to spare — retirees, remote workers, people already tuned into politics. That’s not the whole comunidad. That’s just the quiet ones.

Kennedy says pollsters are scrambling. Some are adding voice verification. Others are hunting for patterns in how bots answer versus how humans do — like the way a real person pauses, or says "uhh" before picking a candidate.

But here’s the thing: if the polls don’t reflect the hustle, the overtime, the cousins who answer surveys while cooking dinner, then what we think the country wants? Might just be what the quietest corner of it says.

Why this matters for us: If the polls don’t hear the real people, elections won’t either.