# HD-INC-138: Two days before Slovakia's election, a faked audio of a party leader discussing vote-rigging spread during the campaign silence

> In late September 2023, days before Slovakia's parliamentary election, an audio clip spread on social media that appeared to catch a party leader and a journalist discussing how to rig the vote. Fact-checkers and the people named said the audio was fabricated, with signs it was AI-generated. It circulated during the pre-election quiet period, when candidates and media are limited in how they can respond, and platform rules did not clearly cover manipulated audio. What effect it had on the result cannot be known.

- Source: https://useheadlights.com/library/HD-INC-138/
- Publisher: Headlights (useheadlights.com), author Ellie Harris
- Published: 2026-08-11
- Company: Meta (Facebook) as the main platform; the source of the audio was not publicly established
- Sector: Social media and online platforms
- Country: Slovakia
- Year: 2023
- Behaviour in the record (Headlights reading): Not established
- Governance domains: Online safety, Civil liberties
- Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0. Cite as: Harris, E. (2026). Two days before Slovakia's election, a faked audio of a party leader discussing vote-rigging spread during the campaign silence. Headlights AI Incident Library, HD-INC-138. https://useheadlights.com/library/HD-INC-138/

## What happened

In the final days before Slovakia's 2023 parliamentary election, an audio clip spread across social media that appeared to capture the leader of the Progressive Slovakia party and a journalist discussing how to rig the election, including buying votes.

The people heard in the recording said it was fake, and fact-checkers concluded the audio showed signs of being generated or manipulated using AI. The conversation never happened.

The timing made the situation worse. The clip appeared during Slovakia's 48-hour election silence period, when campaigning and media coverage are restricted. That made it much harder for those targeted to respond quickly or widely. Fact-checkers and the platforms did react, but reports at the time suggested many of the platform's manipulated media rules were written mainly for video, leaving AI-generated audio in a grey area. Meta later expanded its approach to include AI-generated audio, images and video, but by then the election had already taken place. It isn't possible to know what impact, if any, the clip had on the result.

## What an auditable version would have shown

An auditable system would have shown exactly what happened behind the scenes. It would record when the audio was first reported, who reviewed it, how quickly it was assessed, what action was taken, and whether its timing during the election silence period triggered a faster response. Instead of guessing what the platform knew and when, there would be a clear record of the decisions that were made.

## Where the gap was

There were two obvious gaps. The first was format. The systems designed to detect manipulated media were largely built around video, while this incident involved audio. The second was timing. A suspected AI fake appeared during the short period before voting when those targeted had the least opportunity to respond. There was no clear fast-track process recognising that an election-related deepfake in the final hours before polling carries a much higher risk than ordinary misinformation.

## What governance should have looked like

During an election, suspected AI-generated political content should be treated as high priority, regardless of whether it is audio, video or an image. A report like this should go straight to a specialist review team, with temporary labels or limits applied while it is being assessed. Each step should be recorded: when it was reported, who reviewed it, what evidence they considered, what action they took, and when. That doesn't decide the election. It simply reduces the chance that a convincing fake gets hours of unchecked distribution at the moment it can cause the most harm.

A VerificationGate is designed to route a plausible political fake to a human quickly and to hold a label or a limit on it while the check runs, rather than letting it spread untouched. A ConductRecord of when the clip was flagged, what was decided, and what the audience was shown lets anyone judge the response afterwards.

The reference implementation of VerificationGate and ConductRecord is open source. It lives at [github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss](https://github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss), Apache 2.0 licensed, free for any company to install. The repository is public now.

## Sources

- [Slovakia: Deepfake audio of a Denník N journalist offers a worrying example of AI abuse (International Press Institute)](https://ipi.media/slovakia-deepfake-audio-of-dennik-n-journalist-offers-worrying-example-of-ai-abuse/)
- [A fake recording of a candidate saying he had rigged the election went viral. Experts say it is only the beginning (CNN)](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/01/politics/election-deepfake-threats-invs)

## Related

- [HD-INC-047](/library/HD-INC-047)
- [HD-INC-069](/library/HD-INC-069)
- [HD-INC-081](/library/HD-INC-081)