Regulatory Consulting at Democracy Works

Overview

Democracy Works is a nonpartisan nonprofit, founded in 2010, that builds the data and technology infrastructure behind American voting — most visibly through TurboVote, a voter engagement platform used by millions, and the Elections API, an authoritative data set of federal, state, county, and municipal election information. Its AI-policy relevance has grown sharply as generative AI became a mainstream source of election information: Democracy Works has built the data infrastructure that powers accurate voting answers inside AI chatbots and search platforms, developed a public framework of best practices for how generative AI should respond to election-related prompts, and cataloged the specific risks AI poses to voters and public trust. In a notable and directly relevant signal for this directory, both OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly partnered with Democracy Works to ensure their AI products display reliable voting and registration information rather than risking hallucinated or outdated guidance — exactly the kind of AI-safety-meets-democracy work this directory aims to surface.

AI-Focused Regulatory Work

Democracy Works occupies a specific and increasingly important niche in AI policy: it is not a think tank writing about AI and elections in the abstract, but the operational data backbone that frontier AI labs themselves rely on to avoid getting election information wrong. Its Elections API supplies dates, deadlines, voting options, and ID requirements sourced from official state and local data, updated continuously by an in-house research team, explicitly built so that ‘search or social media platform[s]… building innovative civic engagement tools with AI’ can integrate reliable answers with confidence. When a generative AI product cannot yet integrate that API data directly, Democracy Works recommends the product simply link to TurboVote rather than attempt to answer election questions from a general-purpose model — a pragmatic acknowledgment that LLMs are not yet reliable enough for this use case on their own. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have announced partnerships explicitly citing this concern: OpenAI said it would use Democracy Works data to display reliable voting-location and registration information, and Anthropic framed its partnership as helping ensure ‘generative AI users are safeguarded from mis- and disinformation about voting and elections.’ Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Democracy Works reported sending 14.5 million TurboVote notifications in the final weeks of the 2025 cycle, publishing election data covering 3,462 elections and 120,980 voting locations nationwide, and receiving a landmark gift from MacKenzie Scott to sustain the infrastructure. For a directory reader, Democracy Works illustrates a distinct and underappreciated AI-policy function: not regulating AI from outside, but supplying the ground-truth data that keeps AI systems from becoming vectors of election misinformation.

Notable AI Policy Work

• Both OpenAI and Anthropic publicly partnered with Democracy Works to integrate its authoritative election data into their AI products, explicitly to safeguard users from mis- and disinformation about voting and elections.
• Published a public framework of best practices for how generative AI products should handle election-related prompts, along with a detailed list of AI-specific risks to voters and public trust.
• Operates the Elections API, an authoritative, continuously updated data set of federal, state, county, municipal, and school-board election information used by search, social, and AI platforms to answer voter questions accurately.
• Sent 14.5 million TurboVote notifications in the final weeks of the 2025 election cycle and published data covering 3,462 elections and 120,980 voting locations nationwide.
• Received a landmark gift from MacKenzie Scott to sustain its voter-engagement and election-data infrastructure ahead of the high-stakes 2026 midterms.

Thought Leadership

1. Elections API — Search, Social and AI Platforms
   Democracy Works’ pitch and technical resource for AI, search, and social platforms integrating authoritative election data — the concrete infrastructure behind its OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships.
2. Democracy Works Elections API and Generative AI
   Details the risks AI poses to voters and the best-practices framework Democracy Works built to guide how generative AI should respond to election-related prompts.
3. We Powered Democracy in 2025
   Democracy Works’ 2025 impact recap and its framing of the organization as ‘connective tissue’ for the broader election-information ecosystem heading into 2026.

Clients

Nonpartisan nonprofit; funded by the Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Pierre Omidyar, among others. AI/platform partners include OpenAI and Anthropic; works directly with state and local election officials via its Voting Information Project advisory committees.