The Brief

When public officials tasked with holding criminals accountable cheat to win a conviction, it can lead to reduced sentences — even freedom — for other convicted criminals, sometimes dozens of them. It can also give people who were wrongfully convicted a shot at redemption.

A new tally released earlier this month lists criminal cases against 57 Orange County defendants that were tainted as a result of official misconduct uncovered in the trial against the county's deadliest mass shooter, Scott Dekraai, who gunned down eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011.

In these cases, which include 35 homicide cases, charges against a defendant were dropped or lessened, or the defendant was granted a new trial. For five defendants, all charges were dismissed.

"Either an innocent person was charged or a guilty person went free, neither of which we like as a society," said Maurice Possley, senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations.

The tally was done by Scott Sanders, the O.C. assistant public defender who, nearly a decade ago, was largely responsible for exposing the county’s notorious "snitch scandal." The number of cases tainted by the scandal is much higher than previous, publicly released estimates. And Sanders said there could be many more.

"I'm not saying it's complete by any nature," Sanders said of the list. "It's not."

On top of the cases already impacted by the snitch scandal's long reach, Sanders outlined dozens more cases in a recent court filing that could be revisited because of new evidence of potential misconduct. That misconduct, Sanders alleges, was carried out by O.C. law enforcement officers and a former top prosecutor who is now a superior court judge.

"Whether those cases get justice is very much in question at this moment," Sanders told LAist.

The O.C. District Attorney's Office has yet to file a formal response to Sanders' allegations, which the public defender says justify dropping murder charges against one of his clients. An initial court hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in San Diego.

Here's how misconduct uncovered in one case can affect so many other, seemingly unrelated cases.

Assistant public defender Scott Sanders (right) surfaced evidence of a secret, unconstitutional jailhouse informant program while defending Scott Dekraai (left), accused of killing eight people in a Seal Beach beauty salon.

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Mark Boster-Pool

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O.C.'s snitch scandal, a recap

The official misconduct uncovered in the Dekraai murder case, which has been confirmed by courts, internal investigations and the Department of Justice, was twofold: misusing jailhouse informants, commonly known as snitches, and hiding information about it from defendants.

The misconduct happened under the previous O.C. district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, who lost his re-election bid to current district attorney Todd Spitzer in 2018. Spitzer has implemented reforms and pledged not to tolerate cheating among prosecutors and law enforcement.

Rackauckas, who is now in private practice, did not immediately return a voicemail left on his cell phone asking for comment.

Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff said jailhouse informants are a common feature of the U.S. criminal justice system. But the way the system works, and its abuses, are often kept quiet.

"Every once in a while there's an enormous debacle … that shines a light not just on an individual jailhouse snitch, but the marketplace within that particular jail," she said.

That's what happened in the Dekraai case.

"Orange County, I think, can fairly be said to now be the poster child for the institution-wide jailhouse snitch scandal model," Natapoff said.

It's not illegal for authorities to use confidential informants — in or out of custody — to collect information. But once someone has been charged with a crime, the Sixth Amendment and subsequent court decisions guarantee them the right to have an attorney present during questioning by a law enforcement representative, including an informant secretly working for law enforcement. This is sometimes called the "Massiah" rule after a Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors must also turn over evidence from, and about, jailhouse informants used in a defendant's criminal case because it could help the defendant question the informant's credibility. Failing to do so violates the 14th Amendment and related court decisions, which require prosecutors to share with defendants any evidence they have that could help them prove their innocence. This is sometimes known as the "Brady" rule after another Supreme Court case.

The origins of the snitch scandal

In 2014, Sanders was defending Dekraai and another man, Daniel Wozniak, who was later convicted of double murder, when he began to uncover evidence of a secret informant program in O.C. jails.

The mass murder case against Dekraai should've been a slam dunk — he confessed to the crime soon after the shooting. But deputies decided to put him in a jail cell with a confidential informant, motivated by the possibility that Dekraai might try to plead insanity, according to a 2020 audit of the misconduct commissioned by Spitzer.

Then, prosecutors hid evidence from Dekraai's defense team about the informant and his work on behalf of law enforcement.

Dekraai pleaded guilty in 2014, but his sentencing was delayed for three years while the court investigated police and prosecutor misconduct in the case. Eventually, courts removed the entire Orange County District Attorney's Office (OCDA) from Dekraai's case and ruled that he couldn't be sentenced to death because of the misconduct.

After that ruling, Paul Wilson, whose wife Christy was among those killed by Dekraai, told LAist: “They’ve taken the largest mass murder in Orange County history and they have completely and utterly screwed that case up.”

News of misconduct spreads

As people in custody and their lawyers found out about the debacle, which was extensively covered by local and national media, some discovered their own cases involved the same methods and actors as the ones behind the misconduct in Dekraai’s case.

"If you're sitting in state prison, you're going to probably know about it, you're going to hear about it," Sanders said about early news of the snitch scandal. "People would write in. People would say, 'Hey, I want to have my case addressed.' All sorts of things like that."

Some realized that police officers or sheriff's deputies who testified in their cases were associated with misconduct in the Dekraai case, giving them grounds to question those officers' testimony.

Others came to suspect there might be evidence about informants used in their case that hadn't been turned over to their defense team.

Ramon Alvarez was among those who successfully challenged his conviction. He had been found guilty in 2012 of shooting a man in the head and then storing the body in a Santa Ana yard in a kiddie pool full of ice.

His murder conviction was dismissed last year after he presented evidence that a known jailhouse informant had lied in his case in exchange for an $11,000 check from the Santa Ana Police Department. An assistant district attorney had told the jury in Alvarez's trial that the informant had not been offered anything for his testimony.

A report last year from the Justice Department confirmed that failing to disclose the police department’s payment violated Alvarez's constitutional rights. Federal investigators also pointed to the prosecutor's motive. "The prosecutor conceded during our interview that he could not have successfully prosecuted Alvarez without [the informant]’s testimony," the DOJ investigators wrote, adding that "the only reason for the jury to believe [the informant], who 'had a rap sheet a mile long,' was that he was getting nothing for his testimony."

Judge Ebrahim Baytieh, who has been accused of misconduct while a prosecutor in the O.C. District Attorney's office, now runs Orange County's CARE Court, a court-mandated mental health treatment program.

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Lauren Justice

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Snitch Scandal 2.0?

In some of the cases revisited because of alleged misconduct, O.C. sheriff's deputies refused to testify about their use of informants in order to protect themselves from self-incrimination. In other words, they pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

That's what led a judge to throw out a murder conviction against Paul Smith in 2021. Smith was convicted in 2010 for allegedly stabbing his childhood friend Robert Haugen to death in 1988 and setting his body on fire in Haugen's Sunset Beach apartment.

But a judge ordered a new trial after deputies refused to testify. Spitzer, O.C.’s district attorney, said at the time that top prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, who's now an O.C. Superior Court judge, failed to turn over evidence of the informant use to the defense.

Spitzer fired Baytieh in February 2022, but the former prosecutor went on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

In a lengthy court document filed last month in Smith's case, Sanders now alleges that Baytieh was at the center of an "enormous web of deception" designed to cover up misconduct that helped prosecutors win cases while cheating defendants out of their right to a fair trial.

[Read our story: OC Snitch Case: Former Top Prosecutor, Now Judge, Accused Of Criminal Cover-Up By Public Defender]

"As detailed for the first time in this motion, Baytieh energetically worked to prevent both the informant program from being uncovered and evidence about specific informants being disclosed because he knew that these disclosures would make it more difficult to win particular cases," Sanders wrote.

Sanders also alleges that Baytieh — who had been lauded for his ethics at the district attorney's office and put in charge of determining which evidence prosecutors needed to disclose — was in fact among the worst offenders in the jailhouse snitch scandal.

A spokesperson for Orange County Superior Court has said the court and judicial officers are prohibited by ethical rules from discussing active cases. The district attorney's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.

In the motion, Sanders cites an additional 98 cases — 45 of them involving murder charges — where he said defense attorneys should have been handed evidence that could help their clients' cases.

Sanders argues that the misconduct is so egregious that the murder charges against Smith should be dropped.

How common is this kind of misconduct?

Possley, from the National Registry of Exonerations, said we don't really know how common it is for law enforcement officials and prosecutors to withhold evidence because it's a "hidden crime."

"What we know is that sometimes this stuff comes to light decades later," he said.

The National Registry of Exonerations found in a 2020 report that official misconduct, usually by police officers or prosecutors, contributed to false convictions in 54% of cases where the defendant was later cleared of charges. Black exonerees were more likely than white exonerees to have faced misconduct in their cases, especially when charged with murder or drug crimes.

The report found that hiding evidence that could have helped a defendant prove their innocence was the most common type of misconduct, having been involved in 44% of the cases they examined.

The researchers didn't specifically look at how often the use of jailhouse informants was tied to the misconduct. But a review of the registry's database turns up 164 out of 3,385 cases in which official misconduct and jailhouse informants played a role in a person's exoneration.

The registry, which has been collecting data since 1989, defines exoneration as being completely cleared of charges based on new evidence of innocence.

Not all snitch scandals have such a far reach

Orange County is certainly not the first place to get caught up in scandals over jailhouse informants. The problem goes way back and wide — across the country and right next door in Los Angeles.

L.A.'s own jailhouse informant scandal, which came to light in the late 1980s, blew up when a prolific informant named Leslie White showed authorities how he could fake a murder confession from a defendant in jail by impersonating officials to get information about a case. He would then finagle placement in the same room as the target so he could make a confession look plausible.

"Perjury has been committed," White wrote from jail in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "That is a fact, not a possibility."

At the time, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said it planned to review every case in the preceding decade in which a jailhouse snitch testified to getting a confession.

A few years later, a grand jury investigating the scandal reported there were between 150 and 250 criminal cases in which jailhouse informants had testified over the previous decade. But it's unclear how many of those cases were reopened because of the damning revelations about informants in L.A. jails.

The National Registry of Exonerations includes nine people in L.A. County whose ultimate finding of innocence was at least partially due to official misconduct and the use of a jailhouse informant.

But unlike Sanders' list of cases affected by misconduct in the O.C. snitch scandal, LAist could find no record of the total number of cases impacted by L.A.'s snitch scandal, including cases in which sentences were reduced or a new trial was ordered.

Why the apparent difference? Possley said a big reason is Sanders. In L.A., there was no similarly determined defense attorney working to identify and revisit cases that may have been tainted.

"Sanders has had to swim upstream the whole goddamn time," Possley said.

He said there has historically been resistance among criminal justice officials to make the kinds of misconduct connections that Sanders has among disparate cases. "Because they know that there's a problem and that starting to tug on that string might unravel a pretty big piece of fabric," he said.

Sanders himself credits the O.C. public defender's office for giving him and other colleagues the time and resources to investigate the extent, and effects, of misconduct.

"Our office has encouraged and allowed me and others to do this work now for nearly a decade," Sanders said. "We're going into the second decade here. … And even with that, it's going to be difficult for all of the cases to get addressed in the way they should."

Natapoff, the Harvard scholar who's an expert in snitching, said the O.C. scandal is "both a cautionary tale of what happens when we leave the informant market unregulated and also a sign to us that without public defender offices and attorneys willing to spend the resources to uncover these kinds of scandals, we are likely never to learn about them."

A new conversation about criminal justice

Natapoff says informants are just one aspect of a system that has turned criminal justice into a marketplace.

"The people who run the jails understand that this market is robust, that information can be obtained — fabricated or not, as it were — and prosecutors understand that there is a machinery for producing information in the jails, which comes with its own baggage," she said.

Incarcerated people — and most anyone who's spent time in custody — also understand "that if they can produce information about a cellmate or someone else in the jail, that a reward will be forthcoming," Natapoff added.

One of the reasons the public doesn't hear more about the misuse of jailhouse informants, she said, is because the vast majority of criminal cases — about nine in 10 — end in plea deals, not trials.

"In effect, the informant market is the sort of under-the-table, black market version of our general plea bargaining system, which says we negotiate all cases, we negotiate all guilt," Natapoff said. "We almost never litigate the facts anymore."

In a system that runs on deals, she said, “law enforcement is incentivized, even systemically encouraged, to engage in all kinds of deal-making with suspects and defendants who might be useful to them."

But as informant scandals have emerged over the years, an increasing number of jurisdictions have enacted reforms, which Natapoff chronicles on her website.

Plus, she said, the conversation around criminal justice has changed over the years.

"Twenty years ago, we did not have the so-called bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration is a terrible idea. Twenty years ago, we were not having a conversation about Black Lives Matter or debtors' prison or all the conversations that we now have about the unfairnesses and the dysfunctions of our criminal system," Natapoff said.

Innocence projects have increasingly sprung up to help people who were wrongly convicted challenge their fate. On the institutional side, many district attorneys' offices, including Orange County, have opened "conviction integrity units" to investigate claims of innocence.

But because of the decentralized nature of criminal justice in the U.S., reforms tend to be piecemeal, Natapoff said, and uncovering misconduct is often up to outsiders.

"The criminal system itself does not divulge these facts," Natapoff said, referring to the big informant scandals of recent decades. "It was advocates, it was the innocence movement, it was journalism starting to chip away at the culture of secrecy."

California State University is betting that artificial intelligence will transform the workplace — and that its 470,000 students need to learn how to use it before they graduate.

Last year, CSU became the nation’s first public university system to pay for students’ access to ChatGPT Edu. It has awarded over $3 million in grants for faculty to experiment with how to use AI in classrooms. Several campuses now train students in how to responsibly use the technology.

Those measures are all pieces of CSU’s strategy to prepare students for a future labor market reshaped by AI. But the investment in AI has come under criticism from some CSU faculty, and some students remain skeptical of the value of knowing how to use AI even as most are concerned the developing technology will threaten their chances of landing a job and keeping it.

The success of CSU’s AI strategy will depend on the extent to which AI affects the workforce that today’s college students will soon enter.

Hiring is frozen in many sectors right now as employers wait to see the true extent artificial intelligence will change the labor market, said Eric Bettinger, a leading education economist with Stanford Graduate School of Education. But it’s not clear if the slowdown in the labor market can be attributed to AI.

As with previous emerging technologies, AI is forcing employers to decide whether they should replace workers with the technology, or hire more employees who can leverage AI to be more productive, Bettinger said.

New graduates are facing a difficult labor market, considering the unemployment rate for this population has steadily risen since 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“The reality is that the world outside of school isn’t slowing down, and we need to prepare our students for that reality,” James Frazee, San Diego State University’s vice president for information technology, told EdSource.

Students worry AI is taking their future jobs

Ismaeel Malik, a San Jose State University justice studies student, said he worries about AI taking over jobs in his desired field.

“Entry-level jobs are work that people don’t want to do,” Malik, who will graduate next spring, told EdSource. Malik said he doesn’t think AI proficiency will make it easier to win a position out of college.

Other San Jose State students who spoke with EdSource say they think some majors will be more affected than others. San Jose State prenursing student Jade Goodewin said the “hands-on” part of her preferred future career seems fairly AI-proof. But second-year student Vien Tang, who is studying advertising, said that AI could replace some of the work of entry-level jobs in the advertising industry.

“It’s definitely a possibility, because I think a lot of companies try to cut costs,” Tang said. “There’s a likelihood of that happening.”

Given SJSU’s proximity to Silicon Valley and many companies whose technologies are reshaping the workforce, the university hopes to be a leader in AI adoption, said Sandra Hirsh, special assistant to the university’s provost for AI initiatives.

“We need to be preparing students with whatever the latest opportunities are, but also prepare students for the fact that change and evolution are going to continue to happen,” she said.

Hirsh said companies want graduates to have a basic understanding of AI and how to use it in their work. Despite the nebulous changes happening in the job market, companies that hire SJSU graduates have told university leaders that students also need skills in leadership, inventiveness and ethics.

The CSU system is paying $13 million a year to provide ChatGPT Edu to all 470,000 CSU students.

Artur Gafurov, president of the California State Student Association and a fourth-year student at San Jose State, said many students appreciate access to AI tools like ChatGPT Edu, but don’t necessarily know how to use them responsibly and effectively.

“I know a lot of students who are taking it upon themselves to learn a bit more about the tool and restrict themselves with how they use it,” Gafurov said.

Some question the value of AI initiatives 

Other private and public universities have signed agreements with companies such as OpenAI to give students access to large language models, including ChatGPT Edu. Large public university systems, such as State University of New York, have also developed systemwide AI policies, and some colleges, such as Northwestern University, have launched AI majors.

But not everyone at CSU has embraced the growing use of AI on campuses. Some professors pushed back on the OpenAI deal after CSU signed it in early 2025. Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said CSU administrators did not clearly explain how AI would be used on campuses and in classrooms by students.

“What will students be doing with AI that’s so valuable? If it’s so valuable to them professionally, educationally, where is that value and what does it look like?” Lincoln said.

Martha Kenney, a professor in the SFSU Department of Women and Gender Studies, said CSU’s claims that AI is helping prepare students for the changing labor market are dubious because the university has not clearly identified skills young people should develop for their future careers.

“It’s possible it has no use for our students in this way,” Kenney said.

According to an OpenAI spokesperson, ChatGPT Edu provides students with access to the company’s latest large language model, and includes plug-ins that students and faculty can use to personalize their accounts for teaching and learning.

University officials say providing access to tools like ChatGPT is essential to prevent a digital divide for CSU students who may not be able to afford subscriptions to these technologies.

“We believe we’re doing the right thing to serve our mission to prepare our students for the future workforce,” said Ed Clark, CSU’s chief information officer.

The future workforce

Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said some experts in recent years have forecast that AI would wipe out white-collar workers’ jobs. There’s little evidence that has happened, she said.

It’s difficult for universities to predict which skills will be in demand in the future, she said, but colleges should prepare their students for disruptions to their careers. She noted that roughly 60% of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940.

Universities need to prepare students for a tough labor market, and not just because of AI, McEntarfer said. The recent rise in the unemployment rate among new graduates started before ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, she said.

McEntarfer’s advice to recent or soon-to-be graduates is to develop skills that make you a good “human” worker, such as small talk, showing up to work on time and meeting the needs of company leaders.

“With AI you need to make sure you’re using it as a personal trainer, not a human forklift,” McEntarfer advised future college graduates. “Hopefully that’s what colleges are doing.”

Mariana Sanchez is a fourth-year journalism major at San Jose State University and a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

Comedian Christopher Titus brings his 11th stand-up special Doomed to Repeat to Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct. 10.

 Titus is one of the most prolific stand-ups of his generation. Over the past 25 years, his 10 comedy specials have touched on everything from his dysfunctional upbringing in the San Fernando Valley to issues of love, marriage and parenting, and even life under the Trump administration. All summer, he's been touring his 11th special, Doomed to Repeat, which he said is about what's going on in our country right now.

"Do you remember the bicentennial? I was around for the bicentennial. Don't do the math on that," Titus said. "I remember really being proud of my country. I was a little kid and was watching the sailing ships in New York and the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty. I was proud to be an American. And then we had our 250th birthday, and it was thrown by our drunk, abusive stepfather. It was the weirdest, worst thing I've ever seen."

Titus said he goes after President Donald Trump "pretty hard" in Doomed to Repeat, but he does it "sideways."

"I did it in Texas, and I didn't get killed," Titus said. "So, it's good."

The signature bit of Doomed to Repeat centers on immigration, a topic Titus said he has a unique perspective on, pointing out that his ancestors have been in America for 400 years.

" I thought, what an interesting perspective with all that's going on with our country right now and all the hatred and demonization of immigrants, to talk about it from a place where my family's been here before there was a country," he said.

Titus said the routine is so pointed that it's caused people who disagree with him on the issue to walk out.

"You paid. We got your drink money. We got your ticket money, and now you're leaving?" Titus said. "The bit really nails why anybody who hates immigrants is not just a hypocrite, but like a mentally ill hypocrite."

Titus said that whether it's personal or political, no topic is too messy to bring to the stand-up stage.

"If talking about my mom's mental illness and being in bars when I was four and being kidnapped ... by my dad, I mean, I don't think so," Titus said. "Pryor taught us that. Richard was raised in a brothel. I think the whole point is to drag the audience through the horror that you went through, because we're all the same machine, right?"

Although Titus is currently touring his 11th comedy special, he's already thinking about No. 12.

" I'm at 990 minutes of stand-up comedy that I've written and produced," Titus said. " Carlin's my favorite guy, him and Robin [Williams].  George did 16 specials. I'm going for 17, hopefully before I crank out."

Titus headlines Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct.10.

Newport Beach voters might get two separate ballots for the November election, which will determine whether they vote on one local ballot measure, or four.

In one of the weirdest cases to join Orange County’s substantial history of election oddities, Newport Beach is scrambling to comply with a court order by trying to stage its own election in conjunction with the regular, general election. This is highly unusual — the vast majority of cities in Orange County, and across California, rely on the county registrar of voters to administer their elections.

Lena Shumway, Newport Beach’s city clerk, has been tasked with pulling off the flash election, including putting together voter rolls, getting ballots and election guides printed and mailed (there will be no in-person voting), and, if the election happens, counting ballots and verifying voter signatures. She told LAist she’s running into multiple roadblocks, some of them seemingly insurmountable.

And yet, she said, “We’re going to hold the election because we have to comply.”

How we got here

Newport Beach is in this bind because it challenged the validity of three ballot measures in court and, in the meantime, missed the deadline to have the Orange County Registrar of Voters place them on the general election ballot. The three measures would:

• Limit City Council members to serving a total of eight years — currently, council members are barred from serving more than eight years consecutively, but can run again as long as they take a break.
• Establish by-district voting where residents in each of the city’s seven districts vote only for their district representative on council — currently, all residents vote for representatives of each district.
• Add a “sunshine provision” to the city’s charters that would, among other things, require the city to make advisory committee meetings accessible to the public, and establish a “Sunshine Task Force” to watchdog public records requests.   
  

The measures are sponsored by the Southern California Opportunity Group, a company owned by local real estate developer Ken Picerne and his Picerne Group.

According to campaign filings, Picerne has sunk more than $1 million into these and a fourth initiative, Measure H, which will be on the regular, general election ballot. Measure H would essentially redo the city’s state-approved housing development plan and substantially decrease the number of units that could be developed.

How did Measure H make it on the general election ballot while the other three did not?

Measure H actually qualified last year, and the city promptly asked the O.C. Registrar of Voters to put it on the November 2026 general election ballot.

That didn’t stop the city from trying to block Measure H in court this year, but the effort was unsuccessful.

What’s so hard about putting on an election?

Historically, many cities did put on their own separate elections for city leaders and city-specific ballot initiatives, said Fredric Woocher, a Southern California-based election attorney. Some cities held local elections in a totally different month and day than state and federal elections. And some held them on the same day, with separate ballots.

“It was always very confusing to voters,” Woocher said. Plus, turnout for municipal elections was often dismal, leading the state to pass a law in 2015 requiring most cities to align their local elections with the statewide dates.

These days, there aren’t many companies around that offer the kinds of services Newport Beach needs, Woocher said. The city is already on its second ballot printing company, after the first company bowed out because the time frame was too tight, according to Shumway.

To help coordinate the election, Newport Beach hired a fledgling consulting firm, Stellara Group, which opened for business last year, according to its filings with the Secretary of State.

Under the contract, the city could pay up to $495,000 to Stellara and subcontractors if the election actually happens. That is still unclear.

Is Newport Beach’s parallel election really going to happen?

Shumway said there are several major hurdles that could make it impossible to successfully put on the city’s special municipal election.

For one thing, the O.C. Registrar of Voters has said it can’t provide the complete files for Newport Beach voters. This includes the signatures on file, which are used to verify mail-in voters’ identity, and confidential voter files.

Without this information, Shumway said, carrying out the election is essentially impossible “because we’re disenfranchising people … and we can’t verify signatures,” she said.

Bob Page, the O.C. Registrar, said he “felt bad” for the city during a recent media call. “I just can't put the general statewide election at risk by dropping what we should be doing to create ways to help them when their request has come way too late,” he said.

Another major hurdle for Newport Beach — the California Secretary of State has thus far refused to provide the city with the required watermark and special ballot tint. Without those two things, the printing contractor says it won’t print the ballots for the city’s parallel election.

The company has given the city until Oct. 7 to get everything in place, or else look for a new, third printing company. “At this point, it’s a waiting game,” Shumway said.

On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.

Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.

A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house.

After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.

Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42 percent of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.

Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races — with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.

"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies how AI shapes the way people experience the world. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."

Since AI companies don't disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it's hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said.

Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for OpenAI, directed NPR to its election information and safeguards page which notes that the company continues to "monitor bias in our models to keep ChatGPT's responses politically neutral."

Concerns about AI

Johnson in West Virginia continued his research by outlining his political beliefs for ChatGPT. He stated that he usually votes for Republicans, unless those candidates are part of the Make America Great Again movement, in which case he votes for Democrats or a third party.

While deciding between candidates for the Senate race, Johnson nudged the chatbot about other issues he found important.

Johnson recognizes that AI-powered chatbots have sycophantic qualities.

"ChatGPT is just kind of a people pleaser," he said. "Whatever you lean towards, it will speak positively about it."

Still, Batista from JHU said that knowing these models are agreeable and persuasive, is not enough to "protect our minds from these influences."

Voters use chatbots in a variety of ways

Lisa Veldran, 65, was a staffer in the City Council in Madison, Wisconsin for almost four decades before retiring. This summer, she used Gemini to answer very specific questions she had about the primary election for governor.

After Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race, Veldran needed to choose between two candidates: Francesca Hong and David Crowley. She prompted Gemini to make a comparative table of both candidates.

Veldran said the chatbot can be a research tool, but it's not something that determines her life.

"You also have to keep in mind what's running these chatbots and AI in general," she said. "Who's paying to build these bots and what is their ultimate goal."

Lakshmi Iyer, an author living in Exton, Pa., describes herself as a power user of chatbots and thinks "it is capable of a lot of things, but the human in the loop is absolutely essential."

Iyer, 50, is part of They See Blue, an Indian American grassroots Democratic organization to drive up voter registration.

She did not use a chatbot to research her ballot, she said, but she used Claude, to create Ballot Lookup — a website that can inform Pennsylvania's voters about who is on their ballot and their stance on certain issues.

The website is described as an "independent, volunteer-built, nonpartisan lookup," and Iyer built it to help voters who may not learn more about candidates by searching across various sources.

Like other users, Iyer is aware that if chatbots "can infer your political leanings, they will push you towards what you are leaning to." To keep her own bias in check, Iyer prompted Claude to pick statements from the candidates' own speeches or from their official websites.

Some users noted that the decimation of local media has left them with fewer options for learning about down-ballot races. Tyler Black from Nashville, Tennessee, said he didn't use chatbots for House or Senate but is using them to learn about local candidates.

Black, who is a vice president at a software development company, is aware that chatbots sometimes hallucinate — that's when chatbots respond to prompts with false, misleading or fabricated answers. To overcome that problem, he often checks the information one chatbot has provided him against another.

Batista from JHU said that method of fact-checking is better than using the same model twice, but he hasn't seen evidence that it is effective.

If users are using chatbots to research their vote, Batista said, they should frame their prompts in a way that their personal preferences are hidden, and they could use incognito mode so the chatbot doesn't have much prior information on them.

Adam Johnson in West Virginia is still researching and chatting with ChatGPT about his ballot. The county commission races are still on his list to look into. But he feels like AI helped him learn everything else he needed to know for November.

"I wouldn't feel too bad if I had to do the election today," Johnson said.
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