State Election Board member proposes divulging voters' personal information to EagleAI

At a Georgia State Election Board meeting Monday, Board Member Janelle King floated the idea of divulging voters’ private information to the founder of software program EagleAI as a way of boosting voter confidence in the state’s election integrity. The third-party program was presented to the board as an alternative to Georgia’s current program for maintaining its voter rolls, a multi-state partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).

EagleAI (pronounced Eagle Eye by its founder, Georgia resident Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards), was founded in the wake of the 2020 election in response to what election integrity activists saw as rampant voter fraud in key swing states like Georgia, despite the fact that officials found no evidence of systemic errors or mass voter fraud. The software allows activists to comb through massive datasets like the National Change of Address Database, identifying people whose registration may contain errors and submitting those discrepancies to local election officials as evidence of malfeasance.

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EagleAI has been used to file hundreds of thousands of voter challenges in Georgia over the past four years in counties like Fulton, Gwinnett, Chatham and Forsyth, but the majority have been thrown out by local election officials who say the challenges lack sufficient evidence.

During his Monday presentation to the board, Richards promoted EagleAI as a way for individuals to identify those who may be improperly registered to vote and report them to county officials, explaining that his software scrapes and compares data from a variety of public sources, including the Secretary of State’s voter rolls, records from the Department of Corrections, county zoning codes and Google Maps. Throughout the presentation, he spoke of how his software allowed him to examine voter registration records without allowing bias or partisanship to cloud his judgement.

“I have no secrets, it’s just data,” he told the board during his presentation. “It’s publicly available data.”

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Yet, at the same time he endorsed harsh interpretations of the state’s election statutes that attorneys who were present said did not correctly align with Georgia law, claiming it is illegal for students to register to vote at their college dorms and suggesting that Georgia residents with errors in their voter registrations had committed felonies.

Richards also pushed back against voter rights organizations, including the ACLU of Georgia, Campaign Legal Center, All Voting is Local and the Brennan Center of Justice, who have questioned EagleAI's accuracy in flagging voter registrations for challenge.

“EagleAI Network has no data of its own, so don’t say our data is not accurate,” he said.

However, critics of the software say that EagleAI often turns up false positives, as it lacks sensitive personal information like driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers that members of ERIC use to compare voter registrations across states. Board Member Sara Tindall Ghazal also argued that canceling voter registrations for those suspected of moving out of state could violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a federal law that among other things, limits how quickly states can remove registered voters from their rolls.

“I am not making a policy view on this, I am telling you what the law says,” Ghazal told Richards during his presentation.

“I would disagree,” Richards replied.

Proponents of EagleAI, like prominent election conspiracy theorist Garland Favorito, told the board they prefer the software over ERIC, which Georgia has belonged to since 2019.

“We consider ERIC a threat to every voter in the state of Georgia, and it needs to go,” Favorito said at the Monday meeting.

Janelle King, the newest appointee to the State Election Board, echoed election integrity activists' concerns about ERIC, suggesting that the Board introduce a competing method to verify voter rolls.

“I would like to see some type of comparison done,” she said. “I would like to see some form of an investigation into this. Because if I’m a state and I’m paying into this organization, I think we should consider another method.”

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She also proposed divulging Georgia residents’ driver’s license and social security numbers — the confidential information that state governments use to verify voter roll accuracy — to EagleAI to test its effectiveness compared to ERIC.

“If the only argument is that [Richards] doesn’t have all the information, then let’s give him the information so that we can see if there is a real issue with ERIC, let’s at least find out,” King said during the meeting Monday.

Ghazal pushed back on King's suggestion, arguing that as an unelected body, the state election board does not have the authority to implement those changes without the state legislature changing the laws around who is allowed to access sensitive personal information.

“As a board, you’re right, we cannot tell the state to utilize [EagleAI] over ERIC,” King replied. “That’s not what I’m saying by any means. What I’m saying is I need all of us to put our thinking caps on and to really look at this with common sense.”

Maya Homan is a 2024 election fellow at USA TODAY who focuses on Georgia politics. She is @MayaHoman on X, formerly Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Board broaches possibility of giving EagleAI access to sensitive info