Google Search is an important way that people seek information about politics, and Google states that it is ``committed to providing timely and authoritative information on Google Search to help voters understand, navigate, and participate in democratic processes''. In this paper, we interrogate the extent to which government-maintained web domains are represented in the online environment of electoral information of the 2022 US midterm elections, as captured through Google Search results in 3.45 million SERPs for 786 locations across the United States between October and November 2022. Although we find that almost 40% of organic results are contributed by the 40% of government domains, this proportional equilibrium hides the fact that most results either belong to a small number of popular domains or are mistargeted (at a rate of 71.18%) with respect to the location of the search. We consider the frequent omission and mistargeting of non-federal websites a form of algorithmic misjudgement that contributes to civic harm, by obscuring the important role that these institutions play in the election information environment.

翻译：谷歌搜索是人们获取政治相关信息的重要途径，谷歌声称其“致力于在谷歌搜索中提供及时且权威的信息，帮助选民理解、参与并融入民主进程”。本文考察了2022年美国中期选举的在线选举信息环境中，政府维护的网域在谷歌搜索结果中的呈现程度——基于2022年10月至11月全美786个地点的345万条搜索结果页数据。尽管我们发现近40%的自然搜索结果来自40%的政府域，但这种比例平衡掩盖了一个事实：大多数结果要么归属于少数热门域，要么相对于搜索位置存在错误定向（错误率达71.18%）。我们认为，非联邦网站被频繁遗漏或错误定向构成了一种算法误判，通过掩盖这些机构在选举信息环境中的重要角色，加剧了公民权益损害。