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Hey Kaitlyn, It's election day in America. First of all, go vote! We've written a lot about AI this past year, so it seemed appropriate to explain how AI was very nearly injected into this election in Georgia. Here's audio I obtained over the course of months about EagleAI, an automated voter challenge tool. -Jason At a public meeting in Columbia County, Georgia late last year, Dr. Rick Richards explained that he had run a piece of software he created called EagleAI against Georgia’s voter registration records. “When we reviewed the Secretary of State records, roughly 8 million registrations, we found 1.4 million typos,” Richards said. “There were 99,523 apostrophes where there shouldn’t be. There were periods in the initials […] There were 197,851 hashtags in the field for apartment number. Well, they won’t match.” Richards said he “offered to clean this up for the state for free, and they said no.” Richards was suggesting that Georgia’s eligible voter list was a mess, and had come to the meeting to pitch the EagleAI tool as something that would help election officials. In Columbia County, where he lives, Richards had found members of the board of elections who were not only interested in his tool, but who actively defended it when challenged by their constituents. Using a public records request, 404 Media has obtained and analyzed several hours of audio from Columbia County Board of Elections meetings over the past year that give a sense for how election officials in one of the most critical swing states considered using AI-powered software to assist with voter eligibility challenges.
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Nancy Gay, the executive director of Columbia County’s Board of Elections, told 404 Media that the county ultimately did not use EagleAI this year because it ran out of time to get trained on it before the election. But the audio shows how the software was pitched, what voters in the county think about it, and, most importantly, show how some election officials have in some cases begun repeating and spreading ideas that are popular with election deniers. EagleAI is a piece of software developed by Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 election to make challenging voter registrations easier. It compiles various databases and web-scraped data (changes of address, obituaries, property records) to create lists of voters whose eligibility can be challenged en masse. Voter eligibility in Georgia is often challenged by arguing that they do not actually live in the state or based on clerical errors and typos. It was inspired in part by a person named Jason Frazier, who challenged the eligibility of nearly 10,000 voters by himself. The existence of a tool like this is concerning in a country where voting access can be difficult, where voters who temporarily move or are displaced or who live in group housing can sometimes be dropped from voter rolls, and where voter suppression efforts are often successful. EagleAI has been called “a voter fraud hunting tool” and “a new anti democracy tool.” An excerpt from a meeting where EagleAI was discussed. The push by EagleAI has coincided with efforts from conservative activists in Georgia to make it easier to remove voters from voter rolls without formal challenges to their eligibility. The Associated Press reported that the eligibility of more than 63,000 voters has been challenged in Georgia since July 1. Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting Is Local, showed up at one of the meetings and said that a current Republican strategy is to distribute lists of voters who they think they can challenge because their records have typos or otherwise seem challengeable. “These lists, even as it is now, are shared with amateur sleuths who can file hundreds of thousands of challenges at a time,” Nabers said. “It’s my feeling and the feeling of others that EagleAI is likely to falsely determine people as ineligible. Somebody could temporarily move for work or school, property records online can be outdated. They can have typos. Multiple voters can share the same name. This program uses unreliable data. We believe, as others have said, that the risk of removing lawful voters is high. The state appears to agree. EagleAI is going to overflag voters as suspicious.” In the meeting audio obtained by 404 Media, Richards called the characterization that EagleAI is meant to disenfranchise people “90 percent horse hockey” and said it was hurting his feelings: “I just can’t believe the voracious evil and lies that people are willing to do to achieve an agenda. I’m not gonna go into all that, it really upset me that people are gonna be this dishonest about something they’ve never even seen. They don’t know me, they don’t know the product. How can they do this? So I’ll hush, before I get started.” According to Richards, EagleAI cross-references (at least) voter lists from state secretaries of state with voting histories, state corporation data, property records from county governments, change of address data from the post office, obituaries, funeral home data, newspapers, death affidavits, county coroners, felony record information, affidavit of deaths and other data sources to create lists of voters whose eligibility can be challenged more or less with the push of a button. Voter rights groups worry that it may also be collating social media posts and other information, and worry that voters may be challenged based on inaccurate or incomplete data. In Columbia County, where Trump won by 37 points in 2016 and 26 points in 2020, Richards found an election board that was willing to entertain using the software to help it “clean” voter rolls and analyze challenges. In effect, the county government discussed using EagleAI to help it verify voter registration challenges that very well may have come from people using EagleAI to make them. Challenging the eligibility of voters despite an incredibly low rate of voter fraud has become a key strategy of right wing organizations in the aftermath of the 2020 election. All over the country, state courts have had to decide whether to allow last-minute voter roll challenges in which conservative groups have asked states to purge hundreds of thousands or millions of voters in any given state.
In meetings in October and December 2023, Columbia County officials repeatedly stressed that EagleAI itself does not purge voter rolls, and that it was interested in the software because Richards is a Columbia County resident who convinced them that the software could streamline what happens after a voter’s eligibility is challenged in the county. According to election officials speaking in the audio, they regularly receive voter eligibility challenges, which can be filed by anyone. But a scenario that the Brennan Center for Justice and other civil liberty groups have pointed out is that election boards that use EagleAI are likely to use it to research voter eligibility on challenges that itself were generated by EagleAI. “EagleAI’s backers also propose that local governments use it to resolve private challenges, which would lead to disastrous registration purges,” the Brennan Center wrote in an analysis of EagleAI. “This scheme is right out of the election denial playbook. Since there’s no evidence that illegal voting is a widespread problem, conspiracy theorists create the facade of a problem and then demand that governments use their solution, never mind the side effects of disenfranchisement and intimidation.” This is the scenario that Columbia County more or less wanted to use EagleAI for. “Anybody in this room can challenge as many voters in the county as they want to. We have had challenges of a voter in the county filing a voter challenge against a single other voter, and we’ve had someone file a challenge against an entire family because they had five voters living at one address,” Larry Wiggins, a Columbia County election board member told meeting attendees about the allure of EagleAI. “And we’ve had people file over 6,000 names on one challenge list.” Wiggins said that when the elections board receives challenges like this, it researches a voter’s eligibility manually, or using another system called ERIC. “EagleAI would be inserted there as a tool to help with the research,” he said, adding that “EagleAI lets you access [various data and voter information] all from one screen.” “People worry the software will change things on the voter rolls or that it will disenfranchise people or it will cause people to feel like they’re being singled out. Well, first of all, they won’t know they’re being researched,” he said. “Because they’re going to be researched because something triggers the research. A death notice, a record in the National Change of Address Database, something of that nature.” Gay, the executive director of Columbia County’s Board of Elections, said that, in Georgia, EagleAI itself would not remove people from the eligible voter list. But it could be used to automate a manual research process that results in the challenged voter being sent a letter that tells them “‘our office has obtained information that you no longer reside in Columbia County. If this is true, please complete this form, send it back to us.’ And then we remove them. If they don’t [send the letter back], we don’t do anything to the record.” “Over the years, we have online [voter] registration, I think our voter rolls probably could have some excess weight on it, because voters do not think about changing their address or voter registration until the day they need to go vote,” she said. “I just want to clean the voter list.” She said that EagleAI would create a “more streamlined and automated” way to review challenges. Wiggins and Gay repeatedly defended the potential utility of EagleAI, while also repeatedly stressing that it would not be used to unilaterally remove voters from voter rolls. But they both dreamt up scenarios where it could be used to streamline the potential removals of voters as the result of a challenge. It was impossible for me to identify some of the constituents who showed up to the meetings because there is no video of them, and the audio that I obtained for some meetings was incomplete, the county told me. But many of the people who showed up came to say that they did not want EagleAI used in Columbia County. When one person asked a voter what the Brennan Center said about EagleAI, the voter said the Brennan Center said “EagleAI is highly unreliable.” Gay interrupted and said “And how would they know? I mean, I’m playing devil’s advocate here.” The voter said “they get people who research these things and do statistics.” Gay interrupted again and said, “But do they do the job?” The voter said “I believe that they and other people who have participated in the process of looking at EagleAI do the jobs and are experts in that field, yes.” Gay laughed, then Wiggins launched into a story about how EagleAI had identified 503 registered voters who were older than 113 years old, the oldest known living person in the United States. A man who had shown up to the meeting to insist that EagleAI not be used in the county challenged the idea that any 113-year-old person would be voting in a testy back-and-forth with Wiggins. “They’re not voting if it says they’re 113 years old,” the person says. “You can’t assume that,” Wiggins responded. “You have to show ID to vote,” the man responded (Georgia has a voter ID law). “Absolutely. But you can’t assume that. There’s one person who is 113. They may or may not vote. But it’s clear their data was wrong when they had 503 people who were older than 113,” Wiggins said. “My point is that problem would be corrected eventually,” the man said “We’re just concerned people could fall through the cracks, and you could accidentally be removing eligible voters.” In another meeting, Wiggins said that in 2020, Columbia County got a challenge on the eligibility of 6,800 voters; the county decided that it would not accept the challenge, and a judge later threw out the same challenge in other counties. Wiggins said that “on my own time, I did a statistical sample review of those voters. And I found 13 people that voted in Columbia County that should not have.” In one of the examples, a voter had temporarily moved to Texas and voted absentee in Georgia, not Texas; Wiggins and a constituent argue about whether or not this is legal. Speaking broadly about the appeal of EagleAI, Wiggins said “it’s sort of like, winnowing the wheat from the chaff. You’ve got to narrow down your focus to deal with the real problems or issues correctly. We’re coming up on what is going to be by all indications the biggest election in American history as far as turnout, could be the most contentious although that’s hard to believe it would be worse than 2020 and it is definitely possible. So we’re looking at everything we can do to do our job better and more efficiently.” Discussion about EagleAI largely disappeared from election board meetings in the immediate runup to today’s election, and Columbia County told 404 Media in an email that they did not actually use it to assess any voter challenges during this election cycle. A recent challenge of 1,550 people was thrown out “due to faulty or outdated information,” Gay told 404 Media in an email. “The plan or intent for us to use EagleAI was as a tool—so if someone dropped a challenge of multiple voters (like the most recent one) we could research their database quicker than doing our own research on multiple public websites to try and aid us in research,” she said. “But we never got to that point where we could utilize it.” Much of last month’s meeting was about the security of vote-by-mail ballot drop boxes, in which “poll watchers” discussed whether someone would need to sign an affidavit to drop off a ballot and asked whether anyone dropping off multiple ballots would be questioned. They also said the ballot boxes—there are only two in the county, the minimum mandated by state law—are being monitored by a human guard and surveillance cameras. They are “manned,” one person said. “As opposed to four years ago, where they were unmanned in many counties,” Wiggins said. “If somebody walks in with a post mail tray [of ballots] like they did in Atlanta, that’s not going to happen.” It’s not clear what he was referring to.
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