Augusta area man created a tool to challenge voter registrations. Trump's allies may use it.

People who question the integrity of the 2020 election and allies of former President Donald Trump want to help regular citizens ask election officials to clean the voter rolls. That effort has alarmed experts who worry that local government workers will be inundated with requests they cannot vet quickly enough, leading to disenfranchisement in 2024.

Anyone can create challenges using a software program called EagleAI Network that pulls in voter registration and history data from secretaries of state, property tax and land use data from counties, change of address records from the US Post Office, obituary data, and criminal records.

Experts cited myriad problems with a system that broadly takes public information and cross-references it to try to find people who shouldn’t be on the voter rolls.

“When citizen volunteers decide to play armchair election administrators, they often conflate people who don’t feel eligible with people who are actually not eligible, and that’s a dangerous conflation,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

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How EagleAI got started

Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards, whose business is based in the Augusta area, said he started EagleAI in response to the 2020 election, after which he said he downloaded the Georgia secretary of state’s voter rolls and allegedly found people who should not have voted. He provided no evidence for this claim when asked and said he no longer has the records.  

Richards said his aim is to flag simple data errors like the difference between “John Smith” in one database and “John W. Smith,” in another. EagleAI can help find users for example, someone who is registered to vote at one address but told the post office they moved.

President Joe Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes in 2020, and there is no evidence of fraud. The narrow margin nonetheless led to Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a fellow Republican, and pressuring him to "find" the votes he would need to win the election.

The program’s name, pronounced “Eagle Eye,” harkens back to an old voter suppression effort in the South called Operation Eagle Eye that the Republican National Committee created in order to help elect Barry Goldwater in 1964. Richards said he had never heard of that program and used the name because he and his associates are Eagle Scouts, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America, and they all have at least “average intelligence.”

“The software just grabs the data from multiple sources,” Richards said. “A trained volunteer flips a screen shot, associates it with the registration number and gives it to the person so all they gotta do is look at it and go into their system. EagleAI does not interface with any government systems.”

In a training video from March 2023 obtained by the liberal group Documented and reviewed by USA TODAY, Richards showed potential users how they might find an obituary of someone who they think is a match for someone on a voter roll, or a homeless shelter that closed years ago but still had people registered to vote at the address.

Why experts are concerned

Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said matching large public databases is “fundamentally flawed.” He said voters could find it harder to vote if their address is out of date on the rolls, and that it can fuel myths of voter fraud.

“We have a mobile electorate,” he said. “People move around a lot in our country. Yet we have local election administration. We don’t have a single national voter registration list. We have 50 different state lists. So almost inevitably, our lists will become inaccurate over time, and that’s not necessarily a problem. It does not mean that there is fraud.”

EagleAI is possible because of laws on the books in the vast majority of states designed to let ordinary people to tell the election office that a neighbor moved. It is especially useful in Georgia, where voters can file an unlimited number of challenges to people’s registrations.

The program has no website, no sign-up form, and virtually no public information aside from some corporate filings from two years ago.

“That challenge form is then placed on a schedule,” Richards said in the March 2023 demonstration. “That schedule is based on the meeting dates of the boards of election. They want them 10 days early, so we pile them up to send 10 days early.

“They’re sent to the person who’s going to challenge them. The person who’s going to challenge them has a right to review and sign off. They click a button, and then all of those challenges are automatically delivered to the board of elections.”

Fellow Georgia resident Jason Frazier, who calls himself a voter roll cleanup expert, consulted on EagleAI, according to Richards. Frazier described in a March 2023 interview with Trump ally Cleta Mitchell how he does internet searches for obituaries that match the names of people who are registered to vote. He said he also targets duplicate registrations.

“When developing EagleAI, we interviewed hundreds of people to learn the best, most accurate, most efficient methods to gather and present the documentary evidence required by counties,” Richards said in a statement. He said Frazier's mass voter challenges have “an incredible record of accuracy.”

Frazier unsuccessfully sought a seat on a local board of elections in Georgia. One of the organizers of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 rally has now endorsed him for a seat on the state’s board of elections.  

“I have no relationships with any political parties, no PACs,” Richards said. “I am 100% nonpartisan. This is just a tool. That’s all it is.” He declined to say who won the 2020 election because EagleAI “has nothing to do with my or anybody else’s beliefs.”

Richards said he isn't hunting for fraud, only information discrepancies. But he says he consulted Frazier because, “When buying jewelry, go to a jeweler.”

EagleAI touted as a replacement for ERIC

Mitchell, the lawyer who was on Trump’s phone call to Raffensperger and played a key role in helping Trump challenge the results of the 2020 election, said secretaries of state should consider using EagleAI in lieu of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.

Nine Republican states left ERIC, which helps with voter roll maintenance, after a far-right disinformation campaign falsely accused it of being tied to George Soros, a Democratic donor who is a popular target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“I think they’re looking for an alternative,” Mitchell said in a video of a March 2023 training call on Zoom obtained by Documented and reviewed by USA TODAY.

The two programs are different, though. ERIC uses full voter files, which include secure versions of sensitive information like partial Social Security numbers. EagleAI can’t access that kind of information, which means it will have the same problems as large database matching programs that have come before it.

“It is one of the hardest things in government to take information on a John Lee or a Maria Rodriguez or a Sean O’Hara on one list and compare it to someone else who has the same name or close to the same name on another list and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re sure this is the same person,’” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“The reason ERIC works so well is because it uses data that government has and only government has including motor vehicle data that cannot be accessed by the general public under federal and most state laws,” Becker said.

Richards said he gave Mitchell’s organization, the Election Integrity Network, trainings via Zoom calls. The organization recruits poll watchers and published conspiracy theories about ERIC.  It’s a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, staffed by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and one of a handful of nonprofits that former President Donald Trump’s Save America PAC has funded. Meadows is facing criminal charges in Fulton County, Ga. for his role in trying to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election, along with Trump and 13 other co-defendants.

Richards said Mitchell isn’t funding his project. EagleAI has a limited liability company in Georgia and a nonprofit called Valid Vote, records show. Donors are not public. Richards described them as a handful of his friends. He declined to say how many users EagleAI has, but said he personally knows every user, and they find him through word of mouth.

He did not say where it is being used, but said there are people licensed to use it in Arizona, another battleground state that Biden carried in 2020.

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EagleAI founder goes to the county level

Secretaries of state and their representatives who spoke with USA TODAY said they either had never heard of EagleAI or were not interested in using it. And Richards said he had no luck with the Georgia secretary of state, so he’s gone down to the county level, where he said local elections officials are more receptive.

“I tried to meet with them for a year and a half or more, to talk to me about it,” Richards said of the office of Georgia secretary of state’s office. “And I offered to do it for free. ‘Send me the data. I’ll clean it up for you and send it back.’ No response.”

Mike Hassinger, spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State, said turning over the state’s voter roll would involve turning over confidential personal information that is not available to the general public. “We are not in the habit of turning over personally identifiable information about voters to any third party,” he said.

Nancy Gay, the executive director for the Columbia County Board of Elections in Georgia, said she first spoke with Richards in December 2022, after someone with her local Republican Party introduced them, and she said she wasn’t ready to use his software. They started talking in earnest in early 2023, she said.

“Having a clean voter list is my ultimate goal,” she said. “It would just be another tool that we would have at our disposal. It wouldn’t have any bearing on any decisions being made, and it wouldn’t be responsible for anything.”

The board signed off an agreement in February to pay the company $2,000 for its services. Richards said the county came up with that fee, that he offers it to citizens for free, and when prompted to name a price, once jokingly asked for $1.

A Georgia law signed in May bans local governments from accepting election funding from outside groups, a law prompted after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to nonprofits that helped election administrators run the 2020 election better. The far-right calls those donations Zuckerbucks, another stolen election conspiracy theory that Trump himself has echoed.

Gay said they expected that the contract would start March 1. Now they’re waiting for Richards’ signature.