Half of the world’s population will vote in 2024, including EPTA members such as the US, UK, European Parliament, Austria, and South Korea. This historic global election year coincides with the widespread introduction of generative AI. With a simple prompt, generative AI can be used in election campaigns to create realistic and high-quality images, videos and audio clips to reach voters through personalized messages. However, it has also become cheaper and easier to automate the spread of deepfakes, mis- and disinformation. Establishing what is true or false, human or AI-generated, has become increasingly difficult. The potential impact of generative AI on democracy goes beyond elections. It is rapidly becoming an integral part of knowledge work and most digital services, and has the potential to underpin political decision making, lower barriers to democratic participation and make public services more inclusive, efficient and accessible. At the same time, there are substantial risks connected to transparency, privacy and reliability that might undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes. The development and deployment of generative AI is led by large technology companies with exclusive insight, resources, and expertise and the explicit goal of creating artificial general intelligence – machines that could match or surpass human intelligence. An ongoing discussion thus concerns how to strengthen democratic governance of AI and building a resilient AI infrastructure.