PROMISE – PROMoting AI’s Safe usage for Elections

The book explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology to help make better data-driven decisions, can be made relevant for elections constructively. With 2024 being the year of elections as almost half the world’s population is experiencing elections, the need for accurate information for voters, candidates and other stakeholders could never have been greater. Concomitantly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the data-driven technologies that researchers have been working for over five decades to provide information may have been considered the right tool to rise to occasion and address the needs. But the sentiment around AI for elections is that of pessimism with fears of misinformation, bots and bad actors interfering with the democratic processes. Our book, PROMISE, takes a counter, constructive look at how AI, supported by complimentary disciplines, may actually help improve the election process. The book contains contributions from experts from a variety of backgrounds including AI, security, journalism, business, law, political science, as perspectives, research papers and even an interview discussion, using the context of elections in US, India, Estonia, the UK, Brazil and Africa. They talk about the challenges, datasets and resources, techniques, global diversity, best practices, and a code of ethics for anyone working in the area inspired by complementary efforts in computing and journalism. This book will serve as an important resource on election topics, AI techniques and trust methods for researchers, teachers, practitioners, students and government officials in their efforts to improve democratic electoral processes with technology. The book will assume that the reader is knowledgeable at high school level about one or more topics in civics and computing concepts. Sufficient background will be given by contributors to make the chapters self-contained and widely understandable.