A tech company backed by one of Donald Trump's former lawyers may be violating Georgia law by facilitating mass challenges to voter registrations.
EagleAI, which was founded right after the 2020 election, pulls data from voter rolls to allow anyone to search for potential errors on registration forms, and then it automatically fills out challenges that are sent to county election boards by local volunteers, reported The Guardian.
“Let’s say that a person is voting for their dead father — it happens a lot of times,” said EagleAI CEO John W. Richards Jr., who's known as "Dr. Rick." "A parent dies, they say, ‘But I know how my daddy would have voted. I’m gonna fill out his ballot.’ They have disenfranchised you.”
Many EagleAI users are members Election Integrity Network, founded by former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was on the phone call in which the former president asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" the votes he needed to overturn his election loss.
“Some [EagleAI users] choose to work their own county, some choose to work other counties,” Richards said. “According to the Georgia law, the person that actually submits the findings of the research has to be a registered voter in the county in which they submit. I don’t recruit those people. EagleAI does not recruit those people. Those people are citizen volunteers who have chosen to help their local counties.”
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Fulton County resident Jason Frazier, who helped Richards and his son John Richards III develop EagleAI, has personally filed more than 10,000 voter registration challenges, and critics say the company may be exploiting a technicality in Georgia law to inject chaos into the vote-counting process.
Richards confirmed challenges were sometimes filed by activists living in other counties, but he insisted they were not "proxies" but "volunteers."
“State law requires a person challenging a voter’s eligibility [to] be a resident of the same county as the voter they are challenging,” said Mike Hassinger, the public information officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s election board. “Boards of election can reject any eligibility challenge that does not meet that requirement, and will break the law if they allow challenges by proxy.”
The Guardian reviewed 16 training videos downloaded from EagleAI's Vimeo account showing Richards teaching members of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network how to use his product, although the CEO claimed no knowledge of them and they were removed a short time later.
“We have found that some of these counties in Georgia don’t like all these challenges, and they are looking for a solution that they can hire and outsource their headache,” Richards said. “So we keep the challenges going on. Keeps the heat up. They know that they can’t respond. So they’re out looking for solutions, which we could be the solution.”
Some of the challenges have cited minor errors, such as an apartment unit number or a missing comma before "Jr.," and Tori Silas, chair of the Cobb County Board of Elections, said the mass challenges are a nuisance and could make counting votes time-consuming and invite mistakes.
“It does put an administrative burden on offices, and that’s been well documented, if 1,000 people or 1,500 people are challenged at one time,” Silas said. “Because that then potentially requires the office staff to investigate and research, when they should be looking at what their day jobs are, administering elections.”
Silas also said proxies could be violating state law if they are filing challenges for individuals living outside the county.
“On its face, it would seem to be contrary to the law, because the law specifically notes, requires, expressly states that the challenge is to be brought by an elector,” she said.
