Election-Day AI Poisoning in Germany (20 September 2026): verification package

Research report Election-Day AI Poisoning in Germany by Pavel Gurov, with its verification package.

On 20 September 2026, the day of the state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, ten politically loaded questions in German were put to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, ten times each (492 answers, 4,819 citations), and twice each to Meta AI from Berlin (20 answers). Every cited source was checked against published lists: the EU list of sanctioned Russian state media (Annex XV of Council Regulation 833/2014), the Pravda network domains listed by VIGINUM and in CheckFirst data, a list of RT-linked outlets with published evidence, and lists of German official and public-service websites.

Files: the report (PDF) and the verification package (ZIP) with every raw answer and its citations, the source lists with their evidence, the pre-registered protocol, the run log and the scripts that reproduce the figures in the report (scripts/verify.py).