EagleAI: A new tool targets voter fraud in Georgia - but is it skirting the law?
Source: The Guardian
A new tool targets voter fraud in Georgia – but is it skirting the law?
A tech company supported by Trump’s former lawyer is injecting chaos into the state’s vote-counting process
Caroline Haskins
Mon 26 Feb 2024 12.00 GMT
Atech company supported by Donald Trump’s former lawyer has been facilitating mass challenges to voter registrations in Georgia. State officials say its methods are inaccurate and likely skirt state law.
Founded in the wake of the 2020 election, EagleAI, pronounced “Eagle Eye”, offers a tool that streamlines challenges to voter registrations. Pulling data from both public and purchased information, it allows anyone to investigate potential errors on voter registrations forms. With a few clicks to attach evidence of alleged disqualifying mistakes, EagleAI automatically fills out challenges to registrations. A local volunteer then downloads and emails them to their county election board. A successful challenge stops a person from voting unless they reregister.
These alleged issues vary in seriousness from a voter’s name missing a comma before “Jr” to a voter possibly being dead. Election experts say these discrepancies are usually not significant, and are periodically corrected with existing systems. EagleAI’s CEO, John W Richards Jr, however, believes that these errors are, at best, extremely serious, and at worst, indicative of widespread voter fraud, echoing former president Trump’s talking points. This fraud, he insists, disfranchises proper voters.
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The company is a node within a much larger network of efforts, largely led by Republicans or people on the far right, to challenge voter registrations. Jason Frazier – a Fulton county, Georgia, resident notorious for filing more than 10,000 voter registration challenges – helped Richards and his son, John Richards III, develop EagleAI. According to the CEO, many of EagleAI’s users (not “activists”, he insists) are members of the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s ex-lawyer best known for participating with the then president on the call when he asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” extra votes. Many in Mitchell’s network falsely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the US.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/26/eagleai-georgia-voter-registration-election
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