In a conference room in downtown Toronto in January 2026, a little-known Israeli company called LogiVote introduced its AI-powered campaign tool to Canadian political strategists and elected officials.
Sitting in the audience was Matt Kindbom, a newly-appointed town councillor from Halton Hills, Ont. He had previously lost an election by 122 votes and was there to learn how to run a winning campaign. “Here I am trying to drink from the firehose,” he told Canada’s National Observer.
Kindbom watched wide-eyed as LogiVote founder Yair Chen flashed a slide across the screen: “Turn them to DIGITAL FIGHTERS.”
The “them” Chen was referring to were voters themselves.
The first step, explained Chen, is to get voters to download LogiVote’s “Victory App.” Voters give the app access to their contacts and identify their friends, family and neighbours. They get points for convincing them to join the app, too.
Once they’re in, the app scans social media for negative posts about the political candidate, using AI to generate a counter-narrative in real-time. In a sea of political engagement tools, this is the real innovation of the app: giving “digital fighters” the ammunition and orders they need to wage political battle on demand.
“They will get a notification by SMS and by email that says something like this: ‘Listen, we need you now!'” said Chen. Users are instructed to copy and paste an AI-generated comment onto social media, defending the candidate.
With municipal elections coming up in six Canadian provinces in 2026, experts warn that “cyborg propaganda” tools could reduce campaigns to battles between humans ventriloquised by chatbots.
“With thousands and thousands of activists, we will generate a unique one to each of them,” Chen added.
No one on social media is told that the comments are written by the same political chatbot, making it hard to trace back to the candidate running things behind the scenes.
LogiVote already has political clients in Israel, Georgia and Portugal. It markets the Victory App as an alternative to using bots: “[V]ictory comes when you have a digital civilian patrol — responding with more efficiency and intelligence than any bot.”
With municipal elections coming up in six Canadian provinces in 2026, experts warn that “cyborg propaganda” tools could reduce campaigns to battles between humans ventriloquised by chatbots.
“What we are doing is actually real democracy. We are driving people to take part in election campaigns,” Chen told Canada’s National Observer.
However, some researchers — such as Fenwick McKelvey, an associate professor of information and communication technology policy at the University of Concordia — are concerned that the technology centralizes speech that appears to come from independent voters.
"You are selling tools under the promise of participating in democracy, undermining the very conditions that enable that democracy," McKelvey said.
‘There is no ethical issue here’
LogiVote’s pitch took place at the NextCampaign Summit — a mainstream conference for Canadian elected officials and the digital strategists behind their campaigns. It was attended by PR firms and operatives from across the political spectrum.
Panelists at the 2026 event included the former Liberal leadership candidate Karina Gould, Ontario's Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria and conservative strategists Kory Teneycke and Hamish Marshall (whose firm One Persuasion Inc. was linked to five anonymous accounts that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting oil and gas.)
The conference was co-founded by strategist Harneet Singh, who Canada’s National Observer recently found was associated with a suspected astroturfing community group in Caledon, Ont.
The conference was aimed at the upcoming municipal elections in Ontario, its website read, “where data, AI and innovation will define the winning edge.”
LogiVote presented at the event in order to bootstrap its expansion into Canada. The company’s website states that it ran a 2021 campaign for Georgian Dream — who now lead a right-wing populist government in Georgia — and it has worked for parties in Israel and Portugal. However, LogiVote only embraced AI relatively recently, in early 2025. It is unclear how effective it has been.
Taking the stage, Chen explained the logic behind LogiVote’s Victory App.
“The point is to react fast,” Chen said. “A post that's got a negative narrative two hours ago is no longer relevant.”
Chen said users are only willing to spend 20 seconds on tasks and that "it becomes a little bit complex because they need to understand the idea." LogiVote's solution is to generate unique comments with AI so that "you just need to copy and paste on the Instagram post."
Chen explained the benefits over bots, which are banned by social media platforms. By relying on real humans to deliver chatbot-produced messages, the app does not trigger those safeguards.
“You don’t have this problem because you have a network of real people doing this job,” he said.
LogiVote rewards users for posting AI-generated comments online as their own speech. An automated system checks their account to verify that they complied and awards them 25 coins. Users with the most coins earn meetings with the political candidate.
The company is one of many using AI to transform online campaigns. PR firms are beginning to use tools such as CiviClick to AI-generate unique emails for constituents to lobby politicians, replacing easily-detectable form letters. Companies like the US-based Influenceable allow undisclosed campaigns to speak through a network of seemingly independent influencers.
Canada’s National Observer asked researchers Jonas Kunst and Daniel Thilo Schroeder, who recently led an international study published in Science on the threat of AI bot swarms to democracy, about LogiVote’s approach, but it was not yet on their radar. The researchers were alarmed.
“I think this is even more sophisticated because it’s an actual human,” said Schroeder. “We argued for better identity management and verification as a potential counter-measure. But this is just not working, right?”
In response to Canada’s National Observer’s findings, Kunst and Schroeder assembled a team of experts in five countries, including scientists at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, to study what they now call “cyborg propaganda.”
“The distinction between grassroots activism and automated influence is collapsing,” wrote Kunst, announcing the research. He warned that cyborg propaganda could increase suspicion, leading voters to withdraw from online conversations.
In an interview with Canada’s National Observer at the conference, Chen rejected criticisms of the app.
“There is no ethical issue here,” he said. “I give the choice to the activist to select if he wants to post it or not. I'm not posting on behalf of his name. I'm not taking his profile and doing it by myself. He needs to copy it. He needs to paste it.”
Ahead of publication, Chen expanded on these arguments in a formal statement, emphasizing that the user can choose to edit the AI-generated text.
“The concept behind the LogiVote Victory App is the opposite of obscuring origin or manufacturing noise,” it stated. “Our intention is to support authentic civic engagement by real people, not to create artificial mechanisms of influence.”
When asked if LogiVote would consider adding a disclaimer of origin to the text the user is instructed to copy and paste, Chen declined, saying, “The responsibility and authorship remain with the person.” He added that LogiVote is “open to exploring” changes like awarding extra points to users who comment in their own words.
But none of this is required under Canadian law.
Campaign tools that rely on a network of humans to disseminate AI-generated comments to influence voters are fully legal. The Canada Elections Act has not been updated since 2018, despite dramatic developments in artificial intelligence.
The Commissioner of Elections recently recommended updates to the act that would require AI-generated messages to include a disclaimer. However, this would not apply to voters posting unique AI comments on behalf of a political party.
According to Kunst, the strategy “raises a massive regulatory paradox.” Since real people post the comments, they don't fit under the definition of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on social media platforms.
And while major chatbot providers have policies against the use of their tools in political campaigns, these are selectively enforced. Political tech companies have begun training their own local models without any safeguards.
“It’s not about spying, okay? It’s about listening.”
Tools like the Victory App have a major bottleneck: recruiting enough willing participants.
To solve this, LogiVote creates WhatsApp groups for political parties, monitoring the conversations. “We are actually giving a score to the people we think are very strongly aligned to your agenda,” Chen said.
Once users are recruited, they identify receptive friends, family members and neighbours, linking them to what appears to be the voter registry. The "pyramid" grows because people trust invites from their personal connections, Chen explained.
“It’s not about spying, okay? It’s about listening,” he told onlookers.
Ahead of publication, Chen clarified that the app’s privacy practices can be adapted for Canada: “[W]e operate with a commitment to implementing the system in a manner consistent with applicable regulatory requirements and the standards of public accountability expected of technology operating in the democratic space.”
But all of this sits uneasy with Chris Tenove, assistant director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia.
“The idea that you would give your contact book information to a party without the consent of the people in your address book is deeply problematic,” he said.
He called for stronger regulations to “reset the playing field so you're not at a disadvantage for avoiding doing stuff that seems unethical or undemocratic.”
Despite decades of expert recommendations, political parties are not subject to federal privacy laws. Companies such as LogiVote fall under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) but their work for political parties is a grey area.
Carney’s government recently introduced Bill C-4, which cements the immunity of federal parties from all privacy legislation and from any historical liability. This was widely seen as a reaction to a BC Supreme Court ruling that found the opposite in 2024.
According to McKelvey, victorious parties often use voter data more effectively. They are reluctant to lose that advantage by banning the tools they rely on to get into power.
“Parties just have not stepped up and it's a real failure of leadership,” said McKelvey. “A tool like this — arguably it’s all above board the second a political party uses it.”
At the end of Chen’s LogiVote presentation, the entire room of elected officials and digital strategists broke out in applause.