EIN advises state-level networks of organizations to use EagleAI, a tool that automatically creates lists of ineligible voters, to challenge voter rolls. EIN network activists across the country manually review these lists and sometimes go door-to-door to support their challenges, a tactic that has been criticized as voter intimidation. Experts have already pointed out flaws in EagleAI’s system: a slight spelling error in a name, such as a missing comma, can cause the name to be mistakenly removed from the voter rolls. The software also reportedly faces many technical problems. Nevertheless, one Georgia county has already signed a contract with the company to use the tool as part of its voter roll maintenance.
According to leaked documents published this month by Documented and ProPublica, one of EagleAI’s funders is Ziklag, a secretive, wealthy group that promotes a Christian nationalist agenda. According to an internal video obtained by ProPublica, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s Voter Roll Cleanup Project,” and one of the group’s goals is to “remove up to 1 million ineligible registrants and approximately 280,000 ineligible voters” in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin.
Mitchell and EIN are also working with a number of other groups that support mass voter roll challenges, including VoteRef, which has obtained and made publicly available voter rolls of more than 161 million people in 31 states. The group is run by Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official and current chair of the Arizona Republican Party. State election officials have said VoteRef’s claims about voter roll discrepancies are “fundamentally false” and have raised serious privacy concerns about the data VoteRef makes public.
EIN is also working with Check My Vote, a website that hosts public voter rolls and highlights so-called fraud, urging people using the system to create walklists that activists can use to go door-to-door before filing voter challenges using templates that can be downloaded from the site.
Mitchell and EIN did not respond to requests for comment.
“These groups, and the broader election denial movement, have been building these structures and projects for months and years in preparation for this moment,” says Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of Documented, “and now everything is finally in place to launch a massive challenge to voter eligibility.”
Maintaining voter rolls is notoriously difficult, given that federal law prohibits them from being removed years after residents have left a jurisdiction. But there’s no evidence to support the claim that this problem is causing voter fraud. Election officials told WIRED that they already have processes in place to keep voter rolls as accurate as possible.
“We are aware of an increase in voter registration challenges over the past year, many of which have been filed by single individuals or entities on the grounds that voters may not reside at their registered addresses,” said Matt Heckel, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State. “These challenges are attempts to circumvent roll maintenance procedures that are strictly governed by state and federal law.”
