WOODSTOCK, Georgia – Conservative activists in Georgia and some other states are quietly pushing for a way to remove names from voting rolls without filing a formal legal challenge.
They are asking election administrators to use their data to purge voter rolls, meaning names could be removed in a less public process than a formal election challenge. The strategy could mean that voters will not be called in advance to defend their voting rights and the identities of those seeking to purge voters may not be routinely public.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office insists that any living voters excluded from the rolls must be notified. But because Georgia has 159 counties and there are no formal rules at the state level regulating these less formal investigations, it’s unclear how each county will respond. People removed in error could vote on a provisional ballot, but local officials could count those votes only in exceptional cases.
The strategy is expanding even as a new Georgia law takes effect Monday, which could prompt counties to remove a larger share of voters through formal election challenges.
This law has already been met with alarm by Democrats and voting rights advocates. They visualize the hundreds of thousands of election challenges filed since 2020 as part of the long Georgia lawsuit voting block story goes back to slavery. Now, as details of the unknown efforts emerge, these advocates fear a two-pronged attack on voting.
“There is transparency built into the challenge process and some level of voter protection as notice requirements and hearings are necessary,” said state Rep. Saira Draper, an Atlanta Democrat and Joe Biden’s 2020 state voter protection director. “ You can’t get around that by just unofficially challenging people and saying it’s not a challenge because we’re not calling it a challenge.”
The less formal approach worked at least once. In suburban Atlanta County Cobb, the county removed some voters after a man submitted questions listing 245 potentially dead people.
“Everything we’re doing is a free service. Hey, this group of 500 people, or this group of 800 people, said they moved. Maybe you should look into that,” he said. Jason Fraziersaid a Republican who formally challenged nearly 10,000 voters in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County during a presentation Friday.
The effort is one aspect of a broad national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to remove names from the lists.
An Associated Press survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties finds that more than 18,000 voters were challenged in 2023 and 2024, although the counties rejected most of the challenges. Election officials anticipate challenges will arise under the new law.
Most controversially, this law says authorities can use the U.S. Postal Service’s national change-of-address list as evidence showing that people have moved, although not as the only reason to remove voters. Opponents consider this list unreliable.
It’s unclear how many changes the law will bring because the state has not issued guidelines to counties on how to address the challenges.
County officials routinely remove voters who are dead, convicted of felonies, mentally incompetent or no longer living in Georgia, using lists provided by the secretary of state’s office.
For people who have moved, federal law says Georgia can only cancel an inactive registration if the voter fails to respond to a mailing and fails to vote in two federal general elections. This process takes years.
Activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election were stolen say the state’s cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and that inaccuracies invite fraud. Douglas Franka former professor who travels the country peddling election conspiracy theories urged Georgians to use software called EagleAI to file challenges this spring.
“You have a constitutional right to challenge every other voter in your county,” Frank said at the Cherokee County Republican headquarters in Woodstock. “In fact, it’s not just your right. It is your duty to clean the electoral rolls.”
True the Vote, based in Texas challenged 364,000 Georgia voters ahead of two U.S. Senate elections in 2021. Since then, individuals and groups have challenged many more. Election officials say many challenges are driven by EagleAI. The tool was created by Dr. John “Rick” Richards Jr., a retired doctor and businessman who lives in the Columbia County suburb of Augusta.
Richards said in an interview Wednesday that the people using his software are volunteer citizens, comparing the work of finding ineligible voters to picking up trash on the road.
“No one will be denied the right to vote,” Richards said. “That’s a load of bullshit.”
In online meetings and in-person appearances last year, Richards promoted EagleAI as a sophisticated platform for cleaning dirty voter rolls. The Associated Press found that the platform is funded and used by Trump supporters, some of whom worked to overturn the 2020 vote, and is linked to the Republican campaign.
An EagleAI paper last year praised the system’s “use of AI” and “multi-layered algorithms” for cleaning dirty voter lists, but Richards now says there is no artificial intelligence at work. Instead, the software is based in part on a database of “suspect” voters hand-built by conservative activists, the AP found.
In recent months, an AP reporter attended publicized online meetings among activists before being asked to leave. The AP also obtained additional meeting videos to give a behind-the-scenes look at how the software is used in states including Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Nevada and Ohio.
“The left is going to hate this – hate this. But we love it,” Cleta Mitchell, a frequent attendee, said during a presentation. Mitchell is a Republican Party election lawyer who participated in the conference call when Trump begged Raffensperger to “find” more votes in the 2020 elections. Trump was indicted in Georgia for the call, Mitchell was not there. Mitchell is now a leader in several organizations pushing to eliminate voting rolls.
Richards called Mitchell’s affiliations “irrelevant.”
“This has nothing to do with the 2020 election — it has nothing to do with current politicians,” he said. “It’s about what’s right, what’s right.”
The election board in Richards’ hometown of Columbia County agreed in December to buy EagleAI software, the only Georgia government known to have done so.
The county agreed to pay $2,000, saying EagleAI would help maintain its voter list but would not be “the only means of removing a voter.” But the deal stalled when Richards didn’t return a signed contract. He said election officials have been too busy so far to utilize the contract’s 90-day training period.
Eugene Williams, an active election challenger and EagleAI user, emailed Cobb County Election Director Tate Fall three lists totaling 245 potentially dead voters in December, January and March, citing obituaries.
“When we investigated, most of them had already been removed from the voter rolls,” Fall told the AP. “But we removed voters based on the data he sent us.”
However, she added that no voter would be removed without proof and a vote from the county election board.
Others are pushing election officials to take action using software other than EagleAI. True the Vote claims its IV3 tool highlighted 317,886 “invalid voter registrations.”
Mitchell has repeatedly urged allies to befriend law enforcement, including in a 2023 EagleAI call with Richards.
She suggested asking authorities: “’How can we help you? What are the things you wish you had that you don’t have? And they always say more money and more people. Well, you can say, ‘We have people and we are here to help you.’”
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Amy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback, Jeff Martin and Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta, Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, Garance Burke in San Francisco and Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
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This story is part of an Associated Press series, “The AI Campaign,” exploring the influence of artificial intelligence on the 2024 election cycle.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
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