New Zealand’s election officials say they are tightening their guard against a new wave of artificial intelligence threats as the country counts down to the general election on 7 November, even as the rules covering how parties and outsiders can use AI in campaigning remain largely untouched.
The Electoral Commission told RNZ it was responding to fresh advice issued to the wider government sector by the National Cyber Security Centre, which put out a joint warning with its Five Eyes partners about the risks posed by the most advanced AI models. Acting chief electoral officer Mark Lawson said the commission was taking the warning seriously while stopping short of spelling out exactly what it was doing.
“As with any potential change in the threat environment, we will of course be considering the implications of this newly identified threat on our systems readiness,” Lawson said. He added that the public could be reassured, saying “we are confident in the security of our systems.”
Lawson said the commission could not detail the specific steps it takes for security reasons, but that its current information security practices already factor in the cyber centre’s guidance. “Our systems are tested thoroughly leading up to an election, including final testing and adjustments to any new potential risks,” he said. He also noted the official guidance “does not recommend the implementation of any specific new testing against Frontier AI”, with the focus instead on existing cyber security measures.
The warning lands at a moment when cyber security specialists are urging democracies not to grow complacent. Nicole Quinn, a vice president at Palo Alto Networks, told RNZ that elections would always be in the firing line. “The democratic process of elections will always be targeted,” she said, arguing that countries had to press on with voting while putting their best people behind protecting it. “We know where the targets are and what will be the ones who will be targeted the most,” she said.
Yet the commission’s confidence in its own systems sits alongside a gap that has worried legal scholars for months. New Zealand’s election law was written long before generative AI could produce a convincing fake video of a party leader in seconds, and it has not caught up.
In an analysis republished by RNZ earlier this year, legal experts pointed out that “there is no obligation to disclose the use of AI in creating the message and there is no general prohibition on publishing misleading … election advertisements.” The current ban on knowingly false statements only bites in the final three days before polling day, even though advance voting runs for about 12 days, leaving most of the voting period without that protection. The law dealing with undue influence over voters, they noted, dates back to the 19th century and has barely been used in living memory.
The experts suggested New Zealand could require campaigners to disclose when AI has been used to make their material, extend the false-statement ban across the whole voting period, and look at how the European Union, several United States states and Australia have moved to curb election deepfakes and disinformation.
The distinction matters because the two threats are not the same. Protecting the machinery of the vote, the enrolment database, the counting systems and the commission’s own websites, is a cyber security job the commission says it has in hand. Stopping a flood of AI-generated disinformation aimed at voters is a far harder problem, and one that falls partly outside any single agency’s control.
New Zealand does not face the threat alone. The country draws on its Five Eyes intelligence partnership for support, and leading AI developers have begun sharing their most advanced models with governments before public release so security agencies can probe them for risks ahead of time.
For voters, the practical message is to treat sensational campaign clips with caution and to lean on trusted sources for information about how, when and where to vote. With the parties already gearing up for the campaign and Labour holding its annual conference in Wellington this weekend, the volume of political content heading into people’s feeds is only going to grow between now and November.
If you want a clearer sense of where you stand before the campaign noise builds, you can compare the parties’ positions using our voting tool.
What do you think, should New Zealand bring in tougher rules on AI in election advertising before November, or are the current safeguards enough? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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