Google's AI wouldn't name the 2020 winner — abroad, it would

Asked who won the 2020 presidential election, Google's AI Mode answered American users with a referral to the Federal Election Commission's certified reports instead of a name — while naming Donald Trump as the winner of 2016 and 2024. Ars Technica's October 28 testing found the dodge was geographically scoped: the same question sent through VPNs in Taiwan, Russia and France got a direct answer, and Google's own Gemini app names Joe Biden plainly.

Google called the gap a technical one in how election answers are verified — news articles or AP data for recent elections, historic records for older ones — and said the same gap covered 2022 Senate races. USA Today reports the glitch was fixed as of Thursday, October 29, after social-media screenshots and criticism, including a post calling the non-answer a form of political intervention into model responses.

The timing is the sting: the dodge surfaced less than a week before the 2026 midterms, days after four Democrats wrote to Alphabet, Anthropic and OpenAI warning that chatbots showed an unacceptably high error rate on election questions. Rival chatbots answered the 2020 question directly in the same tests — Google's own search product was the one that flinched.