The Deepfake Gap: Regulating False Statements & AI to Safeguard Elections

Hancock's March 2026 policy report addresses a specific and tractable legal gap: the mismatch between the UK's existing false statement law (Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act, which prohibits making false statements about candidates) and AI-generated election disinformation including deepfake videos, synthetic audio, and AI-fabricated candidate statements. The report analyses the legal requirements of Section 106 against the characteristics of AI-generated content and proposes specific statutory amendments to close the gap.

The statutory precision of this report distinguishes it from most AI election security literature, which tends to argue for regulatory reform at an abstract level without identifying the specific legislative provisions that need to change. Hancock's proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Act are directly actionable — they are the kind of specific reform that legislative counsel could draft, which is the standard that policy proposals need to meet to actually change law. For practitioners advising on UK election law reform and for the broader audience of democratic jurisdictions grappling with the same gap, this is a model of technically grounded policy analysis.