Free and Fair: Election Law in the Age of AI

Hancock and Seger's January 2025 systematic review of UK election law's adequacy for AI-era threats is the most comprehensive legal analysis of this gap available from a UK think tank. The report covers political advertising transparency, deepfake prohibition, micro-targeting regulation, and platform obligations, comparing UK law against EU and US regulatory approaches to identify where the UK is ahead, where it is behind, and what legislative reforms would bring it to an adequate standard.

The comparative dimension gives the report particular value for non-UK readers: by mapping three regulatory jurisdictions against the same set of threats, Hancock and Seger produce a structured basis for comparing approaches that is not available from any single-jurisdiction analysis. For policymakers in EU member states working on election law reform and for researchers assessing the comparative adequacy of different democratic jurisdictions' AI election governance, this report provides a useful benchmarking framework. The legislative recommendations are specific enough to be directly actionable in a UK parliamentary context.