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Feeling unheard by the election establishment — including those belonging to the Republican Party — conservative activists are taking the election-fraud issue into their own hands with a new tool they see as promising.
EagleAI NETwork is a database network that has been fed voter rolls and other election records in order to rapidly process data and unearth those voter registrations that may be fraudulent. Activists using the EagleAI program review those registrations that have been red-flagged with their own research — using Google Maps, searching obituaries, or even visiting homes in person — to determine whether the voter rolls are up to date or not.
A report by NBC News details the growing use of EagleAI — which the outlet describes as “voter fraud vigilantism” — as well as the backlash from the Left.
According to NBC, EagleAI has the potential to provoke a nationwide controversy regarding the legitimacy of the upcoming 2024 election.
“And while a handful of individuals in Georgia and Texas have taken in recent years to filing mass voter challenges, EagleAI could turn that steady stream into a nationwide flood,” the outlet notes.
EagleAI’s creator is Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. His vision is for the program to serve as the alternative to the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the establishment’s interstate partnership for the elections community to share data for keeping voter rolls up to date. But ERIC has been criticized by conservatives who say it can’t be trusted.
“EagleAI NETwork™ is a tool where citizens concerned with this issue can log in, see the data, easily review the data against publicly available data, and with a click, send the data to their local election officials,” Richards said in a description of his platform.
EagleAI has been embraced by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally, Republican attorney, and former Oklahoma state representative who, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, tried to help Trump win amid reports of voter fraud.
Mitchell was on the phone call in which President Donald Trump said to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes in order to win the Peach State. She spearheads the Election Integrity Network, a national organization that recruits right-wing activists for efforts to prevent and detect voter fraud.
“The left will hate this,” Mitchell said in reference to EagleAI during a March demonstration of the program hosted by the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT). “They will hate it. But we love it.”
For several months now, activists in various states have been being trained in the use of EagleAI through in-person and Zoom meetings. Georgian activists are receiving training over this summer, while states such as Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, and Texas are expected to follow soon.
The growth of EagleAI’s popularity among the Right has not been without pushback.
As NBC News notes:
Election experts warned that the kind of public data that Richards plans to use may lead to a high rate of false positives. ERIC, the coalition of states that share data to flag registration problems, uses personal, protected data like driver’s license numbers to ensure accuracy when it’s flagging voter registrations for problems. The EagleAI activists will be using public data, according to Richards, though he told NBC News he’d like to get more data by partnering with states.
“The results are going to vastly over-inflate potentially inaccurate voter registrations,” said David Becker, an election expert who led the effort to create ERIC, which is run and financially supported by member states.
Some observers anticipate that the rise of EagleAI could lead to a flood of voter challenges in places such as Georgia. In that state, citizens are allowed to challenge another’s voting eligibility, which triggers a hearing at which the challenged individual is able to defend his right to vote.
A Georgia law passed in 2021 established that individuals may file an unlimited number of challenges. One Georgia man, Jason Frazier of Fulton County, has challenged a thousand voter registrations by himself. Last year, at least 92,000 registrations were challenged.
As the country approaches the 2024 presidential election, tensions associated with the legitimacy of elections — and the procedures behind them — are growing.
On Monday, a Texas judge dealt a momentary blow to a law that Republicans intended to use to crack down on the potential for voter fraud in the state’s most populous county.
State District Judge Karin Crump in Austin on Monday temporarily blocked a law abolishing the position overseeing elections in Harris County, a Democratic stronghold. This came after county officials filed a lawsuit earlier this month. But, almost immediately, the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed an appeal to the state Supreme Court.
The law in question was Republicans’ answer to issues during the November elections in Harris County, which included delayed poll openings and shortages of paper ballots. This resulted in nearly two dozen Republican candidates filing lawsuits on the grounds that these problems, along with illegally cast ballots, were to blame for their losses.
In light of this situation, the new law, which is set to go into effect on September 1, would return election oversight to the tax assessor and county clerk.
The establishment media has been hyping up the possibility of an election crisis, laying the blame at the feet of Trump and his supporters. Their criticism of EagleAI comes off as another attempt to fuel that narrative, setting the groundwork to dismiss any future legitimate concerns about voter fraud in 2024.
