How we’re supporting the 2026 U.S. midterm elections

People come to Google to stay informed during election season — like when finding their polling site, watching candidate debates, or tracking results on election night. We take the responsibility to deliver high quality, trustworthy information seriously. Here’s how we’re approaching the 2026 U.S. midterm elections.

Helping you find reliable information

We highlight official resources and are rolling out interactive tools across Search, including in AI Mode and AI Overviews, and in the Gemini app to connect you with election information. This includes polling locations, registration deadlines and other official data provided by state and local governments and Democracy Works, as well as real-time voting results from The Associated Press.

Connecting you with reliable information also means helping you spot AI-generated content. Our SynthID tool adds imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated media, allowing you to verify media just by asking "Is this made with AI?" across the Gemini app, Search, and Chrome. We're also rolling out additional protections to limit the creation of misleading election-related images. In addition, we support industry standards like C2PA Content Credentials, and launched Backstory to help you check where a piece of content came from and if it's been edited over time.

For added transparency, YouTube creators must disclose AI content, which is labeled on their videos, and we recently introduced automatic AI labels on the platform. We require political advertisers to complete our election ads verification process and disclose if they use synthetic or digitally altered content. Election ads must include “paid for by” disclosures and are publicly available in our Political Advertising Transparency Report.

Protecting our platforms from abuse

Elections are frequent targets for cyberattacks and coordinated influence operations. Our Trust & Safety team and Google Threat Intelligence Group work around the clock to detect and disrupt this activity. We regularly publish our findings and share them with government officials and industry partners.

Our policies and YouTube community guidelines prohibit content that misleads voters about democratic processes, like how, when, and where to vote. We enforce these rules consistently regardless of political affiliation. When an account violates these policies, we take swift action, ranging from restricting specific features to account termination.

Equipping high-risk users with advanced security tools

Election and government officials, campaigns and journalists also face increased cyber risks. To help them stay protected, we offer our most advanced security tools at no cost:

• Advanced Protection Program: Our strongest cyber protections, now integrated with passkeys for enhanced security.
• Project Shield: A free program that protects election websites from distributed denial of service attacks and legitimate traffic surges.
• Fairwind Program: Access to our advanced cyber model to find and autonomously fix software vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit them.
• Privacy controls: Tools for candidates and journalists to request the removal of AI imagery featuring their likeness on YouTube and certain personal information from Search.
• Digital skills training: Through partners like Defending Digital Campaigns and our own Google Civics Training Center, we offer campaigns and election officials best practices for staying safe online, using AI responsibly, and getting verified on YouTube.

As the 2026 U.S. midterms approach, we’ll keep working to ensure our tools remain helpful and secure. Learn more about our work on our elections public policy page.