Montgomery County launches voter services chatbot ‘Mo’

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Have a Montgomery County election question? You can ask Mo.

That’s right, Mo. The black-and-white, clickable, robotic dog seated on the bottom-right corner of the Montgomery County voter services website.

Mo is an AI chatbot created to answer basic election questions.

Just don’t ask Mo who to vote for.

“I’m not able to help with candidate recommendations or voting advice — that falls outside what I’m here for!” is the answer Mo types out when asked.

The generative AI chatbot only relies on verified information from the voter services website and the county geographic information system, according to Montgomery County. Don’t believe it? Ask Mo who won the 2020 presidential election.

“For questions about past election results, I’d recommend checking a trusted news source or the official Pennsylvania election results website,” is Mo’s response.

From locating a polling location to instructions on how to submit a mail ballot, Mo has the 24/7 capability to spit back an answer and translate it into more than 70 languages. Montgomery County created Mo with the aid of Citibot, a Charleston, South Carolina-based software company that specializes in crafting chatbots for local governments.

“Given all the disinformation that’s out there, we wanted to compete and be able to get accurate information out into the world and the way to do that is to use AI for public good,” Commissioner Neil Makhija said.

Leading up to an election, the county can field “a thousand calls a day” regarding voting, Makhija said, so it was decided to find an easy way to make the information easily accessible.

To that end, Mo received hours of training. Privacy and security were top priorities during the build-out phase, Makhija said, and to that end, Mo does not gather or store any personal information.

“This is not a generalized chatbot that roams the internet as an AI agent,” he said. “This is something that only pulls information from what we have determined is accurate and should be made accessible to more people.”

Will the public trust Mo? Survey says …

AI chatbots like Mo still have a long way to go if they want to claim the mantle of man’s best friend.

A 2024 survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts found that most Americans do not trust AI-powered election information.

According to a recent Pew Research Center study tracking Americans’ views on AI, more people are relying on the technology than ever before, and yet generally believe AI will have more negative than positive impact on society.

The skepticism extends to chatbots, the 2026 study found. A majority of Americans over the age of 50 do not use chatbots. The most common reasons why people chose not to use chatbots included lack of interest, privacy concerns and an absence of trust in the information chatbots disseminate, according to the study.

Yet, AI chatbots are becoming more common across government, according to research from the University at Albany’s Center for Technology in Government. Mila Gasco-Hernandez, co-author of the study and research director of the Center for Technology and Government, speculated that it might be because these government entities do not want to fall behind.

“The number of chatbots in websites is increasing and so many local, state and clearly also at the federal government level, they do have chatbots on their websites,” Gasco-Hernandez said. “But I had never come across a chatbot that gave electoral information.”

She said Mo is the first election-specific government chatbot she’s aware of. Gasco-Hernandez said trust is an important component to whether Mo succeeds.

“There are two factors that are very important when we use chatbots and ask residents to use them, which is the accuracy of the information they provide and how consistently they answer the same questions, even if the question is asked in different ways,” Gasco-Hernandez said.

Makhija acknowledged the stakes. He said it was important that Mo was trained correctly.

“We’re doing this to actually increase confidence in elections by getting good information out there,” he said. “And if we use technology right, it can actually serve to support democracy rather than to diminish.”

Montgomery County is encouraging users to submit feedback from experiences with Mo.