Launched on Tuesday, Feb. 10, by Cole Patterson, a southern Orange County native, Civiq utilizes AI to compile in one color-coded place voter registration information, past election results, campaign finance amounts, census details and more data, viewed either as an overhead view of the state or narrowly tailored by a legislative district or city.
Put more simply, the platform creates a “library” of just who lives in the area the campaign wants to reach.
How many people eat at fast food restaurants. The prevalence of primetime news viewership, or whether streaming is preferred. Who has pets, children or college degrees. What languages voters primarily speak.
“We’re really hoping this is going to help campaigns and candidates actually just better communicate with voters, really having a deeper insight into who each voter is, what they care about, how to reach them,” said Patterson, founder of Optiq Data, a technology start-up company that houses Civiq under its umbrella.
“At its basic core, campaigns, issue advocacy organizations, groups that are doing this work can be a lot more strategic in the messages that they’re going to be sharing, how to share them and ensuring voters are actually being reached with issues that matter to them,” said Patterson, who served as a data director for the California Republican Party and the Republican National Committee.
Take the information Civiq provides on how many people in an area visit fast food restaurants, for example. That data could be useful to an organization pushing for minimum wage increases.
But while Civiq can compile data and help campaigns understand just what they’re looking at, it does not actually tell an outfit how to run its operation. In other words, as Patterson put it, the AI isn’t meant to replace a campaign manager, but rather act as an aide.
There’s even a disclaimer at the bottom of the data that essentially says: This is for brainstorming purposes only. For campaign strategy and professional advice, please consult a qualified campaign professional.
Still, Civiq’s use of AI is meant to be another tool in the arsenal for campaigns — whether they are political, trade organizations, public affairs or advocacy organizations — to reach people in a more personalized manner.
And it underscores just how prevalent AI is becoming not only in everyday life, but in elections as well.
Electing AI
Esther Kim Varet‘s first ad in her campaign for California’s 40th District featured a man in blue jeans standing in front of a pickup truck, a woman sitting in a home, and a grocery store employee wearing a blue polo shirt and nametag.
They talked. They gestured. They blinked. They were lifelike, but they were not real.
“I’m a fake person made by AI prompts. I may look real and sound real, but there is nothing authentic about me,” said the man by a truck.
While Kim Varet used fake people in her 2025 spot — they were meant as an attack on incumbent GOP Rep. Young Kim in the race, whom the Democratic contender called a “fake moderate” — other videos that have popped up this election cycle are even more phony.
In fact, these are called “deepfakes.”
After clips of a tense exchange between California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter and a CBS television reporter emerged last year, videos on social media that purportedly showed Porter and the reporter in a physical altercation went viral. They were not real but rather digitally altered.
And in Massachusetts, Brian Shortsleeve, a Republican candidate for governor, posted to social media a fake radio ad that used AI to digitally alter Democratic Gov. Maura Healey’s voice.
“Here’s what one of her radio ads might sound like — if she was honest,” Shortsleeve captioned the fake audio of the incumbent.
That sort of utilization of AI is what concerns Michael Tesler, an expert on campaigns and elections who teaches political science at UC Irvine.
Especially as it is becoming more difficult to decipher what is obviously false and what could plausibly be real.
“That fuels all the bad stuff in terms of distrusting and disliking the other side even more than we already do,” said Tesler.
“I think that is very likely to continue unless there are some costs for doing so,” he said. “And I don’t see, in this environment, the political cost, who is going to be the one to speak with a definitive voice to say, ‘This is not true,’ and, ‘This is not appropriate.’ I just don’t think that voice exists, and that makes this very difficult to combat.”
But Tesler is encouraged by models like Civiq that use AI for good.
Noting that the practice of microtargeting — using online data to target specific voters or potential voters — has had its flaws, Tesler said AI might enhance the algorithm for campaigns to determine what voters actually care about.
“To the extent that microtargeting improves because of AI, that should be a real benefit for campaigns in terms of mobilization to get people out to vote,” Tesler said.
It could also help civic-minded individuals who are considering running in a hyper-local contest, such as for a school board seat or city council, said Louis DeSipio, an expert in electoral politics who also teaches at UCI.
“That’s a big commitment,” said DeSipio, especially considering races at the local level aren’t typically manned by high-powered campaign consultants.
“The AI could help you make some decisions early on if you want to get into the race,” he added. “If you don’t know your district well enough six months in, when you’ve been running every weekend, you still don’t know where to allocate your time and your resources — that will come through to voters. This is a front-end tech that could help people make these decisions.”
But DeSipio is also concerned about deepfakes, particularly as the technology gets “smarter” and defects we had been trained to look out for — AI-generated images or videos could produce an extra finger or an impossibly bent arm, for example — are becoming less prevalent.
He’s worried, too, about campaigns’ potential weaponization of AI to deny the outcome of an election.
“The denialism we’ve seen at the national level and some state races, AI will contribute to that because it can find some anomaly that would be easy to explain but could be used by a campaign to say, ‘Hey, there is a malfeasance’ in the election,” DeSipio said.
If there is a positive with AI in elections, Tesler said, “perhaps it’s mobilizing people around issues they care most about.”
“I tend to think the mobilization aspect is good, but the misinformation standpoint is really terrifying,” said Tesler.
In other words, the experts said, when it comes to AI in elections, there’s the good (mobilizing voters), the bad (creating false content) and the ugly (generating completely false information that is difficult to disprove).
A Civiq lesson
It’s no secret that it takes a lot of manpower to run a successful campaign.
But Patterson hopes that Civiq will help campaigns cut back on the massive amounts of research they generally have to do to glean all the data they need in the first place.
And by doing that, “folks are able to be more strategic and a little less generic,” said Patterson.
“That way, voters are actually receiving messages that are a little more tailored to them rather than — what I think currently happens — is a lot of voters receive the same exact message from the same exact campaigns,” he explained.
Patterson described the product as a “privacy-first platform” that utilizes multiple layers of safeguarding to ensure there’s not only accuracy but also trust and transparency in the platform.
It uses only anonymized and aggregated data with its large language model — a system that is trained on massive amounts of data — and that means no first or last names, phone numbers, physical addresses or email addresses are included in the tools presented. (Social Security numbers, Patterson noted, are not included on the voter files.)
And while Patterson has worked in Republican politics, Civiq is a nonpartisan venture, he said.
More information, including demos and pricing — a basic package can run $99 a month, while a more advanced one with voter intelligence and advanced analytics is estimated at $299 per month — can be found on Civiq’s website, civiq.vote.
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