Georgia election board hears pitch from anti-voting activist on dodgy voter fraud tool

A right-wing activist with ties to Cleta Mitchell pitched a controversial new program for hunting voter fraud to Georgia’s election board. 

Rick Richards, who created EagleAI — a voter roll database that has been found to use unreliable data to flag voters for removal — is back with a similar new program: ELLY. 

Richards gave a nearly hourlong presentation on ELLY to Georgia’s GOP-controlled election board Wednesday. He described it as an open-source program that ordinary concerned citizens can use to find ineligible voters on the county level, by cross-referencing voter registration data with an aggregation of public records, like U.S. Postal Service data, obituaries, property tax information, Google maps, and other sources. 

Richards urged Georgia’s election board to require counties to use ELLY to help clean voter rolls.

Richards previously developed EagleAI with the backing of the Election Integrity Network, founded by Mitchell, who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. 

Voting advocates say programs like Eagle AI, ELLY, and Psephos — a nearly identical program, built for the state level — use unreliable data that can lead to eligible voters being wrongly removed from the rolls. 

“When election officials devote taxpayer-funded time and resources to evaluating voter purge tools like ELLY or Psephos — products promoted by Rick Richards, who is closely aligned with well-known election deniers — alarm bells should sound,” Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight,  said in a March statement about ELLY and similar voter purge tools. “These platforms use unreliable datasets that are notorious for generating false flags, wrongly marking eligible Americans as suspicious and jeopardizing their right to vote.” 

But some Republicans on the board appeared eager to work with Richards.

 “I’m very interested in a pilot project with Dr. Richards to use ELLY in 5-10 counties and come up with his findings, his results to see if it’s workable, beneficial, helpful for the counties,” Janice Johnston said during Wednesday’s meeting.

Johnston, who announced Thursday that she’s stepping down from the board, pushed for a vote on a motion to link ELLY to the SEB’s website so anyone could check their voter registration. 

But chairman John Fervier shot down the proposal.

“I think it’s inappropriate for us to hear a presentation today, one side of a presentation, and then vote to link it to our website without having a legitimate discussion of it,” Fervier said. “We’ve got to hear both sides. If there are people who oppose it, they need to be able to oppose it.”

Richards, who said he’s been developing ELLY for six years, pitched the program as an alternative to ERIC, the nonpartisan data-sharing network that’s considered the gold standard in helping states maintain accurate voter records. Throughout Richards’ presentation, he bashed ERIC as dysfunctional, secretive, and ineffective.

“Nobody really knows what ERIC does,” Richards said. “I know what they’re supposed to do, but I don’t know what they do, and neither does anybody else.” 

Red states began pulling out of ERIC after a cascade of disinformation and conspiracy theories from far-right media in 2022. Georgia is one of 27 states and Washington, D.C. that’s still a member. 

But Johnston and the GOP-led board have long pushed for the Peach State to withdraw. With ELLY, it appears the SEB might have found a way to undermine the state’s reliance on ERIC. 

Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the board, suggested bringing in a representative from ERIC to the board meeting to dispel the disinformation circulating about the organization. 

“I think it behooves us and behooves the voters and our audience to bring somebody in to give that presentation [on ERIC],” she said.

Richards and his son, John W. Richards III, are reportedly pitching ELLY to election officials in other states, too.