They say all politics is local, but that’s the idea behind a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps California campaigns actually learn about the people they’re trying to reach.
Civiq, launched on Tuesday, February 10 by south Orange County native Cole Patterson, uses AI to bring together color-coded voter registration information, past election results, campaign contribution amounts, census details, and other data in one place that can be viewed as a bird’s-eye view of the state or fine-tuned by congressional district or city.
More simply, the platform creates a “library” of people who live in the areas your campaign wants to reach.
How many people eat at fast food restaurants? the prevalence of prime-time news viewership, or whether streaming is preferred; People with pets, children, or college degrees. The language primarily spoken by voters.
“I’m really hopeful that this will allow campaigns and candidates to actually better communicate with voters and gain deeper insight into who each voter is, what they care about, and how to reach them,” said Patterson, founder of Optik Data, a technology startup that owns Civiq.
“Basically, campaigns, issue advocacy organizations, groups that are doing this work can be more strategic about the messages they share, how they share them, and making sure that the issues that are important to voters are actually getting through,” said Patterson, who previously served as data director for the California Republican Party and the Republican National Committee.
For example, consider the information Civiq provides about the number of people visiting fast food restaurants in a region. This data could be useful to organizations pushing for higher minimum wages.
But while Civiq collects data and helps campaigns understand what they’re focusing on, it doesn’t actually tell organizations how to execute their operations. In other words, as Patterson said, AI is meant to serve as an assistant, not a replacement, for campaign managers.
There’s also a disclaimer at the bottom of the data that basically says “This is for brainstorming purposes only.” For campaign strategy and expert advice, please consult a qualified campaign professional.
Still, Civiq’s use of AI is intended to become another tool for campaigns, including political, industry, public relations, and advocacy groups, to reach people in a more personalized way.
And this highlights how pervasive AI is not only in everyday life but also in elections.
AI selection
Esther Kim Valette’s first ad for California’s 40th District campaign featured a man in blue jeans standing in front of a pickup truck, a woman sitting in a house, and a grocery store employee wearing a blue polo shirt and name tag.
they talked. They gestured. They blinked. They seemed real, but they weren’t real.
“I’m a fake human created by an AI prompt. I may look real and sound real, but there’s nothing real about me,” the man in the truck said.
Kim Barrett’s use of a fake persona in the 2025 election was intended to attack incumbent Republican Rep. Young Kim during her campaign, and the Democratic candidate called Kim a “fake moderate” – other videos released during this election cycle are even more bogus.
In fact, these are called “deepfakes.”
After footage of a tense exchange between California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter and a CBS television reporter was released last year, a video of an alleged physical altercation between Porter and the reporter went viral on social media. They were not real, they were digitally altered.
And in Massachusetts, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Shortsleeve posted a fake radio ad on social media that used AI to digitally alter Democratic Gov. Maura Healey’s voice.
“If she was honest, this is what her radio ads would sound like,” Shortsleeve captioned the incumbent’s fake audio.
Michael Tessler, a campaign and election expert who teaches political science at the University of California, Irvine, has concerns about this type of AI use.
Especially since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decipher what’s clearly false and what’s probably real.
“That’s adding to all the bad news in terms of mistrust and hatred of the other side, even more than we already feel,” Tessler said.
“I think it’s very likely that this situation will continue unless there is some cost involved,” he said. “And in this environment, I don’t think there’s going to be a political cost to who is going to be able to come out and say, ‘This isn’t true,’ ‘This isn’t appropriate,’ and say, ‘This isn’t true,’ ‘This isn’t appropriate.’ I don’t think that voice exists, and that makes it very difficult to fight this issue.”
But Tesla is encouraged by models like Civiq that make good use of AI.
Tessler noted that the practice of microtargeting (using online data to target specific voters or potential voters) is flawed, and said AI could enhance campaigns’ algorithms to determine what voters actually care about.
“To the extent that microtargeting is improved thanks to AI, that should be a huge benefit to campaigns in terms of mobilizing people to vote,” Tessler said.
It could also be useful for civic-minded individuals considering running in hyperlocal elections, such as school board or city council races, said Luis DeSipio, an electoral politics expert who teaches at UCI.
“This is a big undertaking,” DeSipio said, especially considering that races at the local level typically don’t have qualified election consultants working on them.
“If you want to participate in a race, AI could help you make some decisions early on,” he added. “After six months, you still don’t know where to allocate your time and resources if you don’t really understand your district, even though you’re still running every weekend. That’s communicated to voters. This is a front-end technology that could help people make those decisions.”
But Decipio is also concerned about deepfakes. Especially as technology gets “smarter” and the flaws we’ve been trained to look out for (for example, an AI-generated image or video can produce an extra finger or an impossibly crooked arm) become less prevalent.
He is also concerned about the potential for campaigns to weaponize AI to refute election results.
“The denialism that we’ve seen at the national level and in some state elections, AI will contribute to that because it can find some anomalies that are easy to explain, but that campaigns can use to say, ‘There was fraud,'” DeSipio said.
Tessler said that if AI could be a positive in elections, it would “probably be able to mobilize people around the issues they care about most.”
“You tend to think the mobilization aspect is a good thing, but the misinformation aspect is really scary,” Tessler said.
In other words, experts said when it comes to AI in elections, there’s good (mobilizing voters), bad (creating false content) and ugly (generating completely false information that is difficult to disprove).
civic lesson
It’s no secret that running a successful campaign requires a lot of effort.
But Patterson hopes Civiq will help cut down on the huge amount of research that campaigns typically have to do to gather all the data they need in the first place.
By doing so, “people become more strategic and less general,” Patterson said.
“That way, instead of a situation where many voters are getting exactly the same message from exactly the same campaign, voters are actually receiving a message that is a little more tailored to them,” he explained.
Patterson described the product as a “privacy-first platform” that utilizes multiple layers of protection to ensure the platform’s accuracy as well as trust and transparency.
Use only anonymized and aggregated data using large language models (systems trained on large amounts of data). This means that the tools provided do not include first and last names, phone numbers, addresses, or email addresses. (Social Security numbers are not included in voter files, Patterson noted.)
Although Patterson has been involved in Republican politics, Civiq is a nonpartisan venture.
For more information, including a demo and pricing, the basic package is estimated at $99 per month, and the more advanced package with voter intelligence and advanced analytics is estimated at $299 per month. It can be found on Civiq’s website civiq.vote.
