Drake University Law School hosted a panel on artificial intelligence in elections on Feb. 23.
First-year Drake Law School student Anthony Zarzycki won the Edmund J. Sease Award to explore intellectual property rights law. Zarzycki used the award funding to assemble a panel of three speakers with different perspectives on AI use in politics. Zarzycki moderated the panel.
Zarzycki said he chose to focus on AI because of his political experience working in campaigns, where he watched AI become increasingly impactful on his work.
“I wanted this to be an opportunity for people to come because they might be interested in one thing or another ,” Zarzycki said. “Intellectual property law is a hard sell; people’s eyes glaze over. So instead of having a nerd session, I wanted to open up to the public to touch a bit on each area within that.”
The panel consisted of Drake philosophy professor Jennifer McCrickerd, Tony Vargas, a politician and former member of the Nebraska Legislature, and Robert Palmer, a lawyer who works with legislators in the Iowa Legislature. Undergraduate and law students, as well as residents of Des Moines, attended the event.
The panel screened different news snippets from across the country from the past year, demonstrating how AI has been integrated into political work. A snippet from WENY News, reporting on a New York law requiring political candidates to disclose AI use in campaigns, generated discussion about whether disclosure is a solution to misinformation.
“There’s a lot of evidence that disclaimers have basically no impact whatsoever,” McCrickerd said. “This doesn’t really get at the problem.”
Palmer said disclaimers are more about the message being delivered and less about the tool used to create it.
Vargas raised issues with mandating disclosure of AI in political campaigns as a “feel-good” solution because disclosure isn’t useful without a larger educational campaign about what AI is and how it sources and creates materials. He advocated for high schools and colleges to introduce coursework that teaches students to distinguish fact from fiction and improve basic computer literacy skills.
“People should be more educated about how [AI] is happening to them and how they should be reacting to it,” Vargas said.
Another news clip from WUSA9 News in Virginia showed that in 2025, Republican lieutenant governor candidate John Reid used AI to create a replication of his opponent and then debated the opponent. Zarzycki asked the panelists how much control a candidate should have over their own campaign platform.
“It’s making people vastly more aware of the problems that have always existed,” McCrickerd said. “There’s value in how you represent someone’s ideas. It’s obviously highly problematic.”
Palmer is most optimistic about the integration of AI into local governments for tasks like language translation and search navigation.
Patti McKee, a Des Moines resident who lives close to Drake, is concerned about the integration of AI into city government websites and help services because of experiences she’s had utilizing those tools.
“I don’t fit into neat little categories,” McKee said. “Sometimes you need to talk to a human to find out about these nuances.”
McKee decided to come because of the impact she’s observed AI having on the political system. She said she went to get clarification on how AI works, but instead walked away with more questions.
“I didn’t know how murky the system was with AI and that there were so many layers with it,” McKee said.
John Krieg, another resident of the Drake neighborhood who attended the panel, found lapses in the content discussed.
“One thing that was not discussed at all, which I think is a huge lapse, is nothing about environmental concerns,” Krieg said. “AI is exacting huge environmental costs to our world and that’s very troubling. Another huge factor is the question about jobs; that’s not a little thing.”
Zarzycki hopes that the panel could be a wake-up call for attendees.
“We all need to be informed citizens, and when there’s so much information, the choices we make in getting that information are really important,” Zarzycki said.
Krieg said that’s the precise reason he decided to attend the panel.
“AI is a fascinating, critical question that we’re facing,” Krieg said. “I’m trying to learn as much as I can about it, just to be able to make informed decisions about what I do with it.”
Zarzycki’s main takeaway from the panel was the power of deciding how to use AI, whether in inputting prompts or implementing tools into work environments.
“Law school, more than teaching me any specific doctrine, whether property law [or anything else], has taught me what choices and decisions I should make to get the outcome I want,” Zarzycki said. “I want people to walk away having that same insight of, ‘What choices do I need to get to know the truth?’”
