Conservative activists find errors in software they hoped would root out voter fraud

After months of testing, some conservative activists are finding that the vigilante computer programs they’d hoped would give them the ability to root out redundancies and fraud in the country’s voter rolls aren’t very reliable.

Last year, those activists excitedly embraced EagleAI and similar programs that promised to help them look through voter rolls across the country in search of outdated or fraudulent voter registrations, even as experts warned about the programs’ limitations.

The country’s voter rolls are designed for registration, not removal. Few people think to cancel old voter registrations when they move, which can lead to messy voter rolls as election officials must wait years to remove outdated registrations under federal law.

And while there’s no evidence that messy voter rolls lead to fraud, they have increasingly become the focus of the movement fueled by former President Donald Trump’s persistent and false claims of stolen elections.

EagleAI, a database founded by a retired physician, pairs large swaths of public data — like obituaries, tax records and U.S. Postal Service data — with voter rolls, and allows activists to peruse the data in search of outdated or inaccurate voter registrations. Activists then bring their findings to election officials or, in states where it is permitted, formally challenge voters’ eligibility themselves.

But in recordings of calls among members of two prominent election integrity groups this spring and summer obtained by NBC News, some conservative activists are finding major problems with the programs.

“North Carolina database is completely nonfunctional,” one activist in the state complained in a March call with the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT). NCEIT is a group of activists allied with the national Election Integrity Network, which was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Last year, EagleAI founder Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. introduced the program to the groups. 

“I talked to Cleta about it last week, and she’s concerned, too, because it’s not just us,” NCEIT president Jim Womack told the activists in the March call. “Cleta and I are gonna look into what it’s gonna take to get Rick where he can get this thing rolled out reliably in all the states.”

Mitchell defended the program in an email and said Womack had “never said one negative word to me about Eagle AI.”

“I have NO problems with Eagle AI. Dr Rick is a national hero. He is amazing and doing amazing work,” she said.

But a week after the March call, the North Carolina activist reported the application was now showing that she lived in another city and it appeared to have corrupted the voter roll data.

“I have more questions than I have answers at this point,” she said.

In an email to NBC News, Richards blamed source data for any inaccuracies in the program.

“EagleAI NETwork™  brings in virgin data from the sources on the attachments. Its accuracy is 100% dependent upon the source’s accuracy,” he wrote.

The program, he added, is a database; it “does not create, alter or interpret original data” and “makes no decisions or recommendation.”

NCEIT leader Womack also defended the database in an email. 

“Eagle AI is a superb tool,” Womack said in an email. “As with all newly fielded applications, we have had to work through a few technical challenges that were unique to North Carolina’s publicly available voter and election databases. We are making progress and we anticipate being fully operational with Eagle AI as the primary NCEIT List Maintenance tool this year.”

In some states, EagleAI is clearly operational, as activists in Florida and Georgia have used it to challenge voters’ eligibility.

In May, NBC News reported that a Florida official shared a list generated by EagleAI with election officials and urged them to “take action.” One local election official who examined the data found it was almost entirely outdated in their county, though. In Georgia, activists have used the program to challenge hundreds of voters’ eligibility at a time one county has signed on to use EagleAI to help it review its own voter rolls, too.

But in a call with activists in the Election Integrity Network in June, some said the program is complicated, and some debated whether they should look at alternatives, like the election integrity group True the Vote’s IV3 program, a web-based app that allows individuals to peruse voting records.

“We’re also working of course with Dr. Richards, with EagelAI in Georgia, but he’s still in development and we’re having trouble getting things going,” one Arizona-based activist said. “He’s still really in user testing.”

A Texas-based activist added that he checks data from programs including EagleAI against county records, because it wasn’t always up to date.

A Tennessee activist added in that June meeting that EagleAI was “too much of downloading software, cost involved, training and all that” for many of his fellow volunteers, so they are starting to use IV3 and Check My Vote.

But a New Mexico activist said in the same call that IV3 was producing inaccurate data.

“One of my favorite nerds locally went to IV3, and then we checked against the voter rolls and determined it was significantly inaccurate — to the point that he wanted to toss it out,” she said.

Representatives with IV3 didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The frustration and griping among activists underscore the limitations of amateurs and vigilantes attempting to do the work that federal law already requires of election officials. Activists also lobbied against the use of a states-run voter-information program that did this work.

That program, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), was once a little-known partnership in which states shared their voter rolls — alongside protected personal information like Social Security and driver’s license numbers that helps ensure more accurate matches — and allowed member states to identify voters who had moved, died in another state or voted twice.

In 2022, it became the target of conspiracy theories claiming it was a covert left-wing operation. Those claims eventually propelled nine Republican-led states to leave the program, removing enormous amounts of data from the partnership — undermining departing states’ ability to vet their own voter rolls and the tool’s usefulness to the remaining states.

David Becker, an elections expert who led the development of ERIC, said the activists’ frustrations with EagleAI are not surprising, because ERIC’s data was far better and the program was run by states themselves.

“This is something that we’ve been telling them all along — that what ERIC does is really hard,” he said in an interview. “People don’t understand, but one of the hardest things to do in government is to take a name on one list — John Smith — and take a name on another list — John Smith —and say with absolute certainty that those two pieces of information relate to the same human being, and that is absolutely crucial in all of this work.”