TL;DR
The Electoral Commission is building an AI system to tell candidates and parties about serious deepfakes within three hours of them appearing online, chief executive Vijay Rangarajan told a Conservative Party conference panel in the week before Tech Policy Press reported his remarks on 15 October. A pilot during the May 2026 local elections fed about three million posts to an AI model; 147 were flagged for human review and ten were judged misleading enough to pass to platforms or police. He also said the Commission fends off “30 to 40,000 attacks a month”.
Rangarajan used the 2025 Irish presidential election as his warning case. A fake video there showed Catherine Connolly saying the vote was off and that she had quit, telling supporters to stay home. She went on to win. He said a similar fake in a British election “will move a significant amount of votes”.
Why three hours
Tracing and prosecuting whoever made a deepfake takes weeks or months, usually ending long after polling day, so the Commission says it will stay “perpetrator neutral”. The goal is speed instead: AI scans posts as they appear, staff check what it flags, and candidates are told quickly enough to respond before content spreads. Rangarajan said three hours is roughly how long a post takes to go viral.
The watchdog will not referee ordinary campaign claims. Its focus is content that could undermine how the election itself is run.
Laws from another era
Rangarajan said the Commission is trying to apply legislation from 1983 and 2000 to campaigns in 2026, which he called “very out of date”. He went further on platforms, saying the Commission believes it has already seen signs of “algorithmic bias” in some campaigns, where a recommendation system quietly changes what political content users see at election time. He did not name a platform, and said the UK currently has no legislative tool to deal with it.
On security, he said attacks peak at 10,000 a day and argued a more sovereign national capability should handle large-scale social media monitoring.
Looking forward
The next general election must be held by August 2029 but could come sooner. In our view, the pilot’s numbers show the useful part of the design: the AI narrows millions of posts to a reviewable pile, and people make the call. The unresolved part is algorithmic bias, which Rangarajan himself says falls outside current law, and which would need Parliament, not the regulator, to address.