Why Wouldn’t Google Tell Me Who Won the 2020 Election?

The world’s most popular AI tool dodged a consequential question.

For anyone who isn’t angling for a job in the Trump administration, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” should be an easy question. But when I asked Google’s AI Mode—the AI function built into its search bar—about the race earlier today, the bot clammed up. “For official results and data regarding the 2020 United States presidential election, including the certified breakdown of electoral and popular votes by candidate, you can review the certified reports published by the Federal Election Commission (FEC),” it said. That was it. No links, no citations, nothing else except the standard fine-print disclaimer that AI can make mistakes.

Yesterday, users of the social network Bluesky circulated screenshots of Google’s AI tool refusing to declare Joe Biden the 2020 victor, even as it readily named Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 and 2024 elections. By this morning, it had become a meme of sorts, as users shared their own twists on the query and came up with funny ways to trick the bot into spilling the truth. Asking Google’s AI to spell the winner’s name backwards, for instance, appeared to unlock the correct answer: “nebiB eoJ won the 2020 United States presidential election,” the bot said. When one user responded to Google’s nonanswer with “what the hell,” the AI coughed up the true result and apologized for initially refusing to name Biden.

AI tools giving strange answers is nothing new. (When Google launched its AI-powered search summaries in 2024, some users were told that the best way to add cheese to pizza was by using glue.) Still, for today’s bots to flub such a simple yet consequential factual question is not normal. In my tests, ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, X’s Grok, and even the Trump administration’s own America.gov chatbot all correctly said that Biden won the 2020 election. As Americans begin to get more of their election information from AI, it’s disquieting to see perhaps the world’s most influential AI information source fail to do so.

The issue wasn’t confined to AI Mode, which turns Google Search into a full chatbot. A standard Google search for who won the 2020 presidential election also failed to trigger an AI summary at the top of the page, and the search engine surfaced only links to other websites. (A question about the 2016 presidential election did trigger an AI answer.) Google now offers such AI overviews in response to a majority of queries, though not ones for which it lacks access to authoritative sources.

People have suspected something nefarious in the omission, and it’s easy to see why. Trump still claims that he won the 2020 election, and questions about the result have reportedly become a litmus test of loyalty to the president. It doesn’t help that Google has a recent history of tweaking its products to comport with his preferences. At the start of Trump’s presidency, he issued an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and Google changed the name on Google Maps. It did the same in August with Lake Ontario, changing its name to “Lake America.” At a rally last week, Trump said he had recently called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to see whether he would rename the Atlantic Ocean too. (Trump said Pichai pushed back on that one.)

In this case, there’s no evidence that Google intentionally censored its chatbot. When I first asked Google about the bizarre result this morning, the company said it was looking into the issue. By this afternoon, Google said that it had identified the problem and was working to fix it. “Our systems verify election responses using news articles or AP data for recent elections, and historic records for older ones,” the company said on X. “There was a technical gap with 2020—same is true for 2022 Senate races, which we’re also working to fix.” Google noted that its stand-alone Gemini chatbot didn’t have the same problem as its AI-search tool, though it didn’t say why. A spokesperson for the company declined to answer further questions. When I tried the same search later in the day, Google’s AI quickly named Biden as the 2020 winner.

Let’s take Google at its word that this was unintentional. Large language models are opaque and unpredictable by nature. Complicating matters, the big AI firms have trained their chatbots to be careful around certain sensitive topics, including election results, and those guardrails can sometimes manifest in unexpected ways.

How reassured should we be? Well, it’s good to know that Google hasn’t made election denial an official company policy and secretly embedded it in search results. Crazy as that might sound, we have to look only at Elon Musk’s xAI for an example of a tech company seemingly manipulating its chatbot’s answers to reflect its owner’s politics. Last year, Grok started injecting claims about a “white genocide” in South Africa into answers about unrelated topics. (The company blamed an “unauthorized modification” to the bot’s code.)

Still, Google’s suggestion that this was just an unfortunate mix-up raises a different set of concerns. Google says its AI overviews reach more than 2 billion people a month. If the company’s search bots trip over the most elementary of election questions, what does that say about all of the subtler ways they could go wrong?

Victoria Feng contributed reporting.