Florida is using a fraud-hunting tool used by the right to look for voters to remove from the rolls

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida wants local election officials to use data collected by far-right activists, some of whom falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen, to potentially remove people from the state’s voter rolls, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

The activist network has been collecting voter data in 24 states, and on May 3, one of them emailed Florida-specific information to a senior state election official. It included the names of about 10,000 voters from across the state who the group insists should be vetted for potential removal from the voter rolls, a process commonly referred to as list maintenance.

The state’s top election official then forwarded this information to county election supervisors and asked them to “take action.”

“I apologize for the delay in forwarding the following email and attachment from a concerned citizen regarding potential interstate registered voters,” wrote Maria Matthews, director of the Florida Division of Elections, in a May 15 email, two weeks after it was originally sent. the 10,000 names.

Matthews acknowledged that it is unclear how the list of names was compiled or where the data came from.

“I do not know exactly when the information was compiled and what sources were consulted to derive this list,” she wrote.

The “concerned citizen” who sent the May 3 email was Dan Heim, a longtime Florida-based activist who has made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud across the state. He told Matthews in the email that he worked with a group that helped create a program called EagleAI (pronounced “Eagle Eye”), a database loaded with voter lists and other records that promises to quickly comb through data and Find records that might be suspicious based on other sources.

It was founded by a retired doctor, Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr., and launched last year to a group of conservative election activists from the Election Integrity Network. That group was founded by former Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Last year, a special grand jury in Georgia unanimously recommended that she be indicted for her role in attempt to nullify the 2020 elections in that state. (She has not been charged in the case.)

“The left is going to hate this,” Mitchell said during an EagleAI demonstration for the Election Integrity Network last year. “They’re going to hate this. But we loved it.”

This comment was made in video demonstrations of the program obtained last year by NBC News. Conservative activists in attendance were told to personally evaluate voter registrations one by one, searching for home addresses on Google Maps to see if the address looked like a house, searching obituaries online and preparing lists of questionable registrations to report to local authorities.

EagleAI’s use of data to curate voter lists has raised concerns with All Voting is Local Action, a multistate voting rights group.

On a Letter sent Friday morning and first obtained by NBC News, the group is asking Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd to tell local election officials to “disregard” the email with the names of the 10,000 voters , to encourage counties “not to conduct list maintenance based on unreliable data and unreviewed data, including from EagleAI and similar databases,” and not to use a state election investigation office started by Governor Ron DeSantis to do any communication that could be considered “inappropriate or threatening”.

“The list did not contain any information about the source of the data or methodology used to identify these voters,” said the letter, which was signed by a range of voting rights groups. “It is a crime in Florida to make frivolous challenges, which are subject to misdemeanor penalties for each voter challenged.”

The letter was also signed by the NAACP, Common Cause Florida, the Legal Defense Fund and the Advancement Project.

It claims the email to Matthews may also violate state law that says someone challenging a voter’s eligibility must live in the same county as the voter. In that case, Heim could not challenge 10,000 voters unless he lived in the same county as each of them.

Brad Ashwell, Florida state director for All Voting is Local Action, told NBC News that allowing thousands of names to be challenged at once could have the effect of bogging down election officials pursuing false claims of possible voter fraud.

“It’s a voter suppression technique and can paralyze the electoral machine at critical points,” he said. “EagleAI has been watching for some time and it was frankly disturbing when we saw this email. Not just because the state is sending this voter list to the supervisors, but basically subverting state law on a couple of fronts.”

His group also has a presence in the seven key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but he says Florida is the first state to have so much movement trying to get EagleAI data into list maintenance. process.

Wesley Wilcox, supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, said that 95% of the records identified in his county were records that his office has already identified for voter roll maintenance – records that have already been removed or are scheduled for removal under the law.

The records were also mislabeled as “Martin County.”

“If I have a 100% accuracy rate, I believe I should expect the same accuracy,” he added.

Christina White, elections supervisor in Miami-Dade County, said the list she received from the state contained just one voter in her county who was also potentially registered in another state.

“As a due diligence, and in accordance with our standard operating procedures, we have contacted the other jurisdiction to determine if this is the same voter. We are awaiting additional information and will take appropriate action based on our collective findings,” she said.

Neither Matthews nor the Florida Department of State returned requests for comment.

A man who answered Heim’s phone number hung up after an NBC News reporter identified himself. Heim also did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Richards did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last year, he emphasized that EagleAI does not determine voter eligibility.

It “simply points out voter records that need to be reviewed by election officials,” he said in an email.

Florida withdrew its membership in another interstate list-keeping program, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), more than a year ago after right-wing blogs spread conspiracy theories about the program. ERIC was administered by member states and used protected personal data such as driver’s license numbers to ensure accuracy when flagging problems with voter registrations.

Heim himself has a long history in Florida of falsely promoting claims of voter fraud.

He is among the leaders of a group called “Defend Florida,” who traveled the state trying to document voter fraud and then uses the false information he collects to pressure state lawmakers to change Florida’s election laws.

In 2022, he met with Florida Republican State Senator Travis Hutson to try to claim that his group had found tens of thousands of cases of voter fraud in Florida. After Hutson asked the group for weeks to provide the information, it ultimately turned over just 230 names, none of which had committed voter fraud, according to an analysis by then-Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a Republican who is now a member of Congress. .

“They were in my office a lot,” Hutson recalled in a Thursday interview with NBC News. “After begging for their details, they finally brought me a list of 230 votes they say were cast illegally. It was not the tens of thousands they claim.”

He said he took the information to Lee, who said, after analysis, that none of the flagged voters voted more than once.

The group was “saying things like a person would vote in Miami and hours later in [Florida] Panhandle,” Hutson said. “You can’t even make that trip in eight hours.”

When Matthews forwarded the email and its 10,000 voter names to local election officials, she made no mention of the group’s partisan ties or Heim’s long history in the state of falsely promoting claims of voter fraud.

It simply requested “action” based, in part, on EagleAI data.

“Please take whatever action you deem appropriate and helpful based on the information and current status of registered voters in your system,” she wrote.

Matt Dixon reported from Florida and Jane C. Timm from New York.