A new tool targets voter fraud in Georgia – but is it skirting the law?
A tech 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.
“Let’s say that a person is voting for their dead father – it happens a lot of times,” Richards, better known as “Dr Rick”, said on a January phone call with the Guardian. “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.” Richards boasts of a background in family medicine and claims to have founded over 40 startups.
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.
EagleAI has largely operated in secret, with no website or public campaigns. But the Guardian has obtained and reviewed more than a dozen EagleAI software tutorials, which shed light on the company’s operations in unprecedented detail.
The videos and public records reveal that EagleAI has been using a Georgia law technicality to inject chaos into the state’s vote-counting process, which requires all challenges to voter registrations to be filed by a person living in the same county. EagleAI gets around this by using in-county proxies. These proxies send the voter registration challenges, usually by email, but activists in different counties and states prepare the legal paperwork using EagleAI.
When asked about this practice, which was demonstrated in the tutorials, Richards confirmed it. But he said that these people are not “proxies” but “volunteers”.
“Some [EagleAI users] choose to work their own county, some choose to work other counties,” he 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.”
In other contexts, like filing public record requests, websites like MuckRock set users up with proxies when they ask for documents from states like Virginia or Arkansas, which only allow requests from state residents. This proxy practice may annoy some public officials, but it doesn’t break the law.
In the context of voter registration challenges, however, Georgia officials have been unambiguous. Using proxies to file voter registration challenges violates state law.
“State law requires a person challenging a voter’s eligibility [to] be a resident of the same county as the voter they are challenging,” Mike Hassinger, the public information officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s election board, said. “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.”
Regina Waller, the communications manager for Fulton county, echoed this sentiment. “It is imperative that challengers are residents of the county,” she said.
Cleta Mitchell’s mysterious involvement
Previous reporting has said that EagleAI received legal and strategic advice from Mitchell. Richards claims that Mitchell has no official relationship with EagleAI, but he also said that she set him up with a lawyer that helped EagleAI’s tax-exempt wing answer questions from the IRS.
The Guardian has viewed 16 training videos, which were downloaded from EagleAI’s Vimeo account after they were briefly posted publicly. When asked about the videos, Richards claimed to have no knowledge of them. They were removed shortly after.
Documented, which has previously reported on EagleAI, shared another video with the Guardian. It shows a recorded Zoom call from March 2023 in which Richards teaches members of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network how to use EagleAI. Mitchell herself was also on the call.
The videos show EagleAI’s proxy system in action. The software downloads voter rolls, voter histories, and business address data from state and county databases. It also gets change-of-address data from the US Postal Service, and files public record requests to state and county offices for lists of felons. EagleAI scrapes the internet, including funeral home websites and newspaper obituaries, for death reports, and buys data from Aristotle, a private company that sells “political data” primarily to political PACs and campaigns, according to its website.
On the March 2023 Zoom call, Richards did a walkthrough. He shared his screen, and viewers can see him logged into his own EagleAI account. The founder, who lives in Georgia’s Columbia county, sifts through data for voters registered in Fulton county, where Trump and his associates are charged with racketeering, conspiracy and dozens of other charges. The data includes authentic data for real individuals – such as their full names, home addresses and dates of birth. As Richards works, a pop-up appears, showing the actual challenge document being filled out. The name of the challenger, rather than his own, is “David Robert Cooke”. The document also shows Cooke’s home address, which the Guardian verified using public records. When reached by phone, Cooke declined to comment.
Fulton county currently has no voter registration challenges under David Robert Cooke, according to Waller, the county’s communications manager. That’s because the March Zoom call was only a demonstration, Richards explained, and the exact challenge forms shown on screen were not sent.
But Richards offered the Guardian a real-life example of its proxy system at work: Cobb county, Georgia.
EagleAI’s proxy system at work
Richards said that “a number of volunteers” are actively researching Cobb county voters, and they choose someone to submit that information to the county election board.
In the March 2023 zoom call, Richards mentioned a “training” in Cobb county in which he gave 35 people access to EagleAI and taught them how to use it. It’s unclear if all 35 people reside in Cobb county.
Tate Fall, director of the Cobb county elections management team , said that only one resident has flagged voter registrations over the past two months.
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That person is Eugene Williams, according to documents obtained via public record request. Standardized forms that Williams has submitted to the county follow the template that EagleAI creates, using the same font and page layout. He’s submitted 176 challenges since December, resulting in a handful of removals, according to Fall.
Tori Silas, chair of the Cobb county board of elections, said that Williams is well known to the board. He has been filing mass challenges since summer 2022, making him a regular presence at board of elections meetings. After someone files voter registration challenges, they have to appear at the next election board meeting and explain their case. Likewise, the person being challenged has a chance to explain or defend themselves.
Meanwhile, at a June Cobb county board of elections meeting, Williams said that he received a “list” from another county resident, Karyl Asta. In July, when questioned again, he clarified that he “did not prepare or obtain the data himself”. Another challenger at that same meeting, Gary Allen, also said he got a list from Asta.
Karyl Asta and her husband, Henri, have submitted their own challenges as well. In October 2022 alone, Williams and Asta collectively filed 1,350 voter registration challenges, all of which were dismissed immediately. The board noted that their challenges only cited technical errors, like missing an apartment unit number on their registration form. These errors are precisely what EagleAI is designed to flag. When Asta was pressed by election officials, David Baker – a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association who has worked for the Georgia GOP and the Republican National Committee – tried to interrupt on her behalf. But ultimately, Asta remained evasive about the group she belonged to, insisting she was merely part of “a group of concerned citizens”. When reached by phone, the Guardian asked Henri Astas about using EagleAI. He conferred with Karyl, said they were “not interested” in an interview and hung up.
Silas said it’s been challenging to respond to the volume of requests these people have filed.
“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, who is a lawyer, said that if they’re proxies for anyone who lives outside the county, they would be in violation of Georgia law.
“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.
‘EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions’
On the March 2023 Zoom call, Richards said there were about 280 EagleAI users. Since then, he said, EagleAI has accumulated “quite a few more”. He declined to give an exact number. (“I learned in the 9/11 attacks that using numbers is just never a good idea,” he said, referring to the confusion about the total death toll in the wake of the attacks.)
Almost all EagleAI users are citizens who use it to file voter registration challenges, according to Richards. EagleAI has been fervently seeking contracts with state and county election boards.
EagleAI has a $2,000 verbal agreement with the election board of Columbia county, Georgia, to conduct a beta trial this year. Richards claims it will entail a different version of its flagship tool that hasn’t been developed yet. Richards has also spoken to election officials in Georgia, Texas and West Virginia, according to documents obtained via public record requests.
Richards explicitly stated in the March 2023 Zoom call that EagleAI fosters a circular dynamic: it overwhelms election boards with voter registration challenges, then leverages the chaos to try to land a paid contract.
“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.”
To date, Richards claims, EagleAI has been primarily funded out of his own coffers. He said he’s not in the business of challenging voter registrations to get rich. When asked about outside funding, he declined to say how much he’s received or where it has come from, aside from his “individual friends”. A public fundraiser has accrued just $1,350 so far.
When pitching itself to election boards, EagleAI argues that it’s better and more transparent than Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – a bipartisan non-profit that shares data between participating states in order to verify registrations and clean voter rolls. Georgia uses Eric to encourage eligible but unregistered voters to register. Eric operated mostly without notice until the 2020 election. Since then, it has been a relentless target of the far right, and nine states have canceled their participation as Trump, Mitchell and others have baselessly alleged that Eric enables voter fraud. Mitchell said on EagleAI’s March 2023 Zoom call that she believed EagleAI could serve as an alternative.
EagleAI has argued in its presentations that Eric is disregarding millions of invalid voter registrations with tiny errors – such as misplaced commas and periods or misspelled names, or registering under a PO box rather than a home address. However, Richards himself said in an email to Columbia county election officials that if EagleAI had access to data that’s already in Eric, it would improve his software’s “accuracy and efficiency”.
After hearing a pitch from Richards, however, some state election officials were left unimpressed.
Blake Evans, elections director for the Georgia secretary of state, said in an August email to co-workers that EagleAI’s data “does not offer any additional value to us”, since Georgia is a member of Eric. Hassinger, the state election board’s public information officer, said that Georgia has no plans of leaving Eric.
“My thoughts are that the EagleAI presentations that I have seen are confused and seem to steer counties towards unlawful list maintenance activities,” Evans said in an email. “Instead of asking questions or being curious about the data, EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then spreads them as if they are facts.”
