What we found
The FBI issued a public service announcement on 15 October 2026 to educate voters about federal election crimes ahead of the November 2026 midterm election and to encourage reporting of suspected violations. That announcement lists intentionally lying about the time, place, or manner of an election to prevent qualified voters from voting as a federal election crime, alongside vote buying and threatening voters with physical or financial harm. It also names conduit contributions or straw donor schemes, contributions from foreign or other prohibited sources, and contributions above legal limits among the campaign finance violations it describes. A companion FBI announcement published the same day states that threats to election workers can be communicated through telephone calls and emails, social media posts, and in-person statements. That announcement defines election workers broadly to include elected officials, appointed officials, staff, volunteers, contractors, vendors and liaisons, giving an individual volunteering at a polling station and clerks handling and counting cast ballots as examples. Before acting on any message about when, where or how to vote, look the date, time and polling location up yourself on an official election site such as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission or USA.gov, and never accept money or anything of value in exchange for your vote. Neither announcement describes a specific ongoing scheme, and neither gives any count of people affected or any sums of money involved. Our harvested material contains no sample messages, caller numbers, email addresses or website addresses, so we cannot say what a false voting message looks like when it arrives. LIVEFRAUD ALERTS is an independent consumer fraud awareness service and is not affiliated with the FBI or any government agency; this alert rests only on the two public announcements cited above.
- Both rows are official FBI public service announcements published on ic3.gov, dated the same day, and speak directly to the subject of the alert.
- The named crime types, contact methods and election worker definitions are quoted conduct categories taken straight from the advisories rather than inferred.
- Confidence covers the warning itself only — the advisories report no incident counts, losses or live cases, so no claim is made about scale.
- Reviewed by 2 models, 1 from independent houses.
- This is a higher-risk finding. Our rule asks for 2 independent reviews before we state full confidence; 1 returned.
- Confidence is shown as moderate for that reason, not because the evidence is weaker.
THE RULE
A false message about when or where to vote can cost you your ballot, and taking money for your vote is itself listed by the FBI as a federal election crime.
What we don’t know
- Whether any specific false-voting-information message, vote-buying offer or donation solicitation is currently circulating, and what it says.
- How contact is initiated in practice — no phone numbers, sender addresses, links or account details appear in either advisory.
- How many voters or election workers have been affected, and in which states or counties.
- Whether any money has moved, and by what method, in the campaign finance schemes the advisory lists.
The bench — who voted
2 INDEPENDENT AI MODELS REVIEWED THIS. 1 OF 2 — ONE MODEL DISSENTED. READ WHY.
The card names a count. Here are the seats behind it, with what each one said.
ANTHROPICclaude-opus-5 · MODERATE
The recommendation to verify voting details at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission or USA.gov is not drawn from either cited announcement; it is the writer's own generic advice and should be flagged as such rather than sitting inside a passage otherwise sourced to the FBI.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDThe 'high' stated confidence is defensible only for the narrow proposition that the two announcements exist and say what is quoted. It should not be read as confidence that any of these crimes is currently occurring at scale; the alert's own unknowns section concedes no incident, volume or loss data exists in the harvested material.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDAn alert whose entire actionable content is 'verify where you vote' and 'do not sell your vote' carries little protective value but does carry a small cost: repeating a list of election crimes with no live example can leave readers more suspicious of legitimate election communications. I would have preferred the panel state plainly that nothing in the evidence indicates an active scheme.
GROQopenai/gpt-oss-120b · LOW
Raised no objection; read the evidence as holds.
Reviewed by 2 independent models; all found the finding carried by the evidence.
▼ Protocol & challenge record
Objection (high): Omission of material context that cuts against the alert's framing. Row 1 states the FBI is providing this information 'Consistent with past practice' — i.e., this is a recurring, calendar-driven voter-education notice, not a response to new or elevated threat activity. The claim renders it as a warning that these crimes 'are a risk ahead of the November 2026 midterm election,' which imports a threat-level judgement the source does not make. The most likely alternative explanation for these two documents existing — routine pre-election boilerplate the FBI publishes every cycle — is never stated anywhere in the finding, limitations or confidence reasons. A reader is left to infer something is happening. Nothing in the harvest says anything is happening.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): 'Two' and 'companion' are unsupported inferences about the shape of the release. The URL slug of row 1 is PSA261015-2 while row 2 is PSA261015 — the '-2' suffix on a same-date PSA strongly implies a numbered series, and both documents end with a truncated cross-reference list ('For additional information on other election-related threats, please see the following Public Service Announcements:') whose contents were not harvested. There may be three, four or more PSAs issued on 15 October 2026. The claim's 'Two FBI public service announcements' asserts a count the evidence does not establish, and 'companion' asserts a pairing relationship that is inferred from co-dating, not from any text we hold.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Provenance mislabelling on the advice sentence. The advice sentence carries row_ids: [], yet every element of it is lifted almost verbatim from row 1's 'Tips to Protect Yourself' ('Use official websites, including the U.S. Election Assistance Commission or USA.gov, to identify the date, time, and location of your polling place'; 'Never accept money or anything of value in exchange for voting for a specific candidate'). Marking sourced FBI guidance as unsourced is an audit-trail error in the opposite direction from the usual one, but it is still an error: it misrepresents which parts of the output are the FBI's words and which are LIVEFRAUD's.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Unsupported targeting in the options payload. 'ATTENTION: VETERANS' has no basis whatsoever in either row — veterans are not mentioned, implied or demographically relevant to anything in the two PSAs. 'Send this to any contractor you know' and 'Forward this to the contractors in your life' commit an entity-match error: 'contractors' in row 2 means election-administration contractors, not contractors generally; a roofing contractor is not in scope. These options being unselected does not cure the problem if they remain selectable.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Risk line contains an unsourced causal claim. 'A false message about when or where to vote can cost you your ballot' is a consequence assertion. Neither PSA states any outcome, harm or loss — row 1 describes the conduct as intended 'to prevent qualified voters from voting' but never says any voter lost a ballot, and the finding itself concedes no incident, count or loss figure exists. The inference is plausible but it is LIVEFRAUD's inference presented in the voice of an FBI-sourced risk statement.
Resolved: Partially resolved by the existing limitation sentences, which state plainly that neither announcement describes a specific scheme and that no victim counts or sums exist. The causal clause in the risk line remains unattributed, however.
Objection (low): Channel list is incomplete relative to the sources. watch_icons lists phone, email and person but omits social media, even though row 2 names 'social media posts' as a threat channel in the same sentence as calls and emails, and row 1 devotes two separate bullets to social media posts spreading false voting information. The finding sentence itself says 'social media posts.' The icon set contradicts the finding text.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): Date currency is asserted but not checked. The whole alert's utility is contingent on being read before the November 2026 election. Nothing in the record establishes the current date relative to 15 October 2026 or to election day, and there is no staleness condition or expiry attached. If this ships after the election it is actively misleading ('this November' in the share directive).
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): Confidence reason overstates what 'speak directly to the subject of the alert' means. The two rows establish, at high confidence, that the FBI published educational material. They establish nothing about the subject a reader will take the alert to be about — namely that voters are currently being targeted. The confidence label 'high' sits on the page next to a finding whose operational content is nil; the third confidence reason gestures at this but buries it.
Resolved: Partially resolved by confidence_reason 3, which explicitly scopes confidence to 'the warning itself only' and disclaims any claim about scale.
Objection (low): Selective omission from the crime list. The claim and finding pick four categories but drop others the PSA gives equal billing to, including 'Voting by non-citizens', 'Political fundraising by federal employees' and 'Use of campaign funds for personal or unauthorized purposes'. The selection is defensible as consumer-relevant editing, but no note records that the list was trimmed, so a reader may take the four as the FBI's emphasis rather than LIVEFRAUD's.
Resolved: Resolved in substance: the evidence limitation for that sentence notes 'The list is a set of crime categories', and the omitted items are not consumer-protective in the same sense.
Preserved dissent
ON THE RECORDI do not accept 'high' confidence on this item as currently framed. What is established at high confidence is that the FBI published two routine educational notices. What the alert communicates — by headline, by risk line, by 'ATTENTION: VOTERS AND ELECTION WORKERS', by three watch icons, by a share directive — is that voters face an active threat. The gap between those two things is the entire alert. The limitations paragraph is honest but it arrives after the reader has already been told to forward this to everyone they know who votes.
ON THE RECORDThe single most important fact in row 1 for judging this item is the phrase 'Consistent with past practice.' The FBI is telling you, in its own second sentence, that this is what it does every cycle. That phrase appears nowhere in the finding. Omitting it is not a formatting choice; it removes the reader's ability to distinguish a routine notice from a response to events. I would require it be quoted in the finding before publication.
ON THE RECORDThe '-2' in PSA261015-2 is a loose thread that was not pulled. Asserting 'two' announcements when the URL structure and the truncated 'see the following Public Service Announcements' footer both point to a larger same-day series is the kind of small, checkable overstatement that undermines everything else on the page. Either harvest the rest of the series or stop counting.
ON THE RECORD'ATTENTION: VETERANS' in the callout options has no conceivable derivation from these two rows. I want it on the record that this option was generated with zero source basis, because a generation process that can produce that option unprompted can produce it selected.
The sources
Official sourceFBI Warns Voters on Election Crimes Ahead of the November 2026 Midterm Election2026-10-15
That announcement lists intentionally lying about the time, place, or manner of an election to prevent qualified voters from voting as a federal election crime, alongside vote buying and threatening voters with physical or financial harm.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Limitation: The list is a set of crime categories; the advisory gives no example wording, channel or frequency for any of them.
Open the original source →Official sourceFBI Warns Voters on Election Crimes Ahead of the November 2026 Midterm Election2026-10-15
The FBI issued a public service announcement on 15 October 2026 to educate voters about federal election crimes ahead of the November 2026 midterm election and to encourage reporting of suspected violations.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Limitation: The advisory is educational and prospective; it cites no case, victim count or loss figure.
Open the original source →Official sourceFBI Cautions About Threats to Election Workers Ahead of the November 2026 Midterm Election2026-10-15
A companion FBI announcement published the same day states that threats to election workers can be communicated through telephone calls and emails, social media posts, and in-person statements.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Limitation: No volume, location or recent-incident detail is given for these threat channels.
Open the original source →Official sourceFBI Cautions About Threats to Election Workers Ahead of the November 2026 Midterm Election2026-10-15
That announcement defines election workers broadly to include elected officials, appointed officials, staff, volunteers, contractors, vendors and liaisons, giving an individual volunteering at a polling station and clerks handling and counting cast ballots as examples.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Limitation: The definition is a scope statement for reporting purposes and does not indicate which roles have actually been targeted.
Open the original source →Official sourceFBI Warns Voters on Election Crimes Ahead of the November 2026 Midterm Election2026-10-15
It also names conduit contributions or straw donor schemes, contributions from foreign or other prohibited sources, and contributions above legal limits among the campaign finance violations it describes.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
Limitation: The advisory does not describe how donors are approached or what payment methods are used.
Open the original source →Other checks
Published under standing founder pass (A9) — every claim source-mapped by the machine.
▼ What the machine checked
- ✓ Not a community submission.
- ✓ No entity is named.
- ✓ All 5 material sentence(s) map to FBI/IC3.
- ✗ anthropic raised 3 objection(s); anthropic recorded dissent — published on the receipt, not blocking (A9 amendment).
- ✓ No audience band is set.
No human affirmed these. They were verified by the classifier described in Amendment A9, on 2026-10-16.
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