https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00612-3
Research
Generative AI voting: fair collective choice is resilient to LLM biases and inconsistencies
1
School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, LS29JT, Leeds, UK
2
Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, 60208, Evanston, IL, US
a
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Received:
3
September
2025
Accepted:
14
December
2025
Published online:
9
February
2026
Abstract
Recent breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) unravel new capabilities for AI personal assistants to overcome cognitive bandwidth limitations of humans, providing decision support or even direct representation of abstained human voters at large scale. However, the quality of this representation and what underlying biases manifest when delegating collective decision making to LLMs is an alarming and timely challenge to tackle. By rigorously emulating more than >50K LLM voting personas in 363 real-world voting elections, we disentangle how AI-generated choices differ from human choices and how this affects collective decision outcomes. Complex preferential ballot formats show significant inconsistencies compared to simpler majoritarian elections, which demonstrate higher consistency. Strikingly, proportional ballot aggregation methods such as equal shares prove to be a win-win: fairer voting outcomes for humans and fairer AI representation, especially for voters likely to abstain. This novel underlying relationship proves paramount for building democratic resilience in scenarios of low voters turnout by voter fatigue: abstained voters are mitigated via AI representatives that recover representative and fair voting outcomes. These interdisciplinary insights provide decision support to policymakers and citizens for developing safeguards and policies for risks of using AI in democratic innovations.
Key words: Voting / Generative AI / Large language model / Collective decision making / Social choice / Proportional representation / Participatory budgeting / Turnout
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00612-3.
Handling Editor: Carlos Gershenson
© The Author(s) 2026
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