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Election deniers are stepping up efforts to disenfranchise American voters

Broadcast United News Desk
Election deniers are stepping up efforts to disenfranchise American voters

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EIN recommended that its network of state-level groups conduct voter roll challenges using EagleAI, a tool designed to automatically create lists of ineligible voters. Activists in EIN’s network across the country would take those lists and manually review them, sometimes going door-to-door to support their challenges — a practice that Condemned for voter intimidation. Expert It has also been pointed out EagleAI’s system has flaws: Minor errors in spelling, such as missing commas, can cause names to be mistakenly removed from voter lists. The software also reportedly faces Many technical issuesNonetheless, one county in Georgia has signed a contract with the company to use the tool as part of its voter roll maintenance.

Leaked documents Published this month by Documented and ProPublica Data shows that one of EagleAI’s funders is Ziklag, an extremely secretive group of wealthy individuals dedicated to promoting an apparent Christian nationalist agenda. According to an internal video obtained by ProPublica, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s Clean List Project,” one of the group’s goals of which is to “remove up to one million ineligible registrations and approximately 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.”

Mitchell and EIN are also working with a number of other groups that are supporting large-scale voter roll challenges. One of them is VoteRef, which has obtained and published voter rolls for more than 161 million voters in 31 states. The group is led by Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official and current chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party. State election officials said VoteRef’s claims about discrepancies in the voter rolls are “fundamentally false.” Highlights major privacy issues About VoteRef’s publicly available data.

EIN is also working with the Check My Vote website, which provides public voter rolls, to highlight its alleged irregularities, urging people using the system to create walk-in lists that activists can use for door-to-door canvassing and then download a template from the site to file voter challenges.

Mitchell and EIN did not respond to requests for comment.

“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, establishing these programs, preparing for this moment for years,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of Documented. “Now everything is in place for them to start mounting large-scale challenges to voter eligibility.”

Voter rolls are notoriously difficult to maintain because federal law prohibits citizens from being removed from a jurisdiction years after they’ve left it. But there’s no evidence to support the claim that the problem leads to voter fraud. Election administrators told WIRED that existing processes to ensure voter rolls are as accurate as possible have worked.

“(We have) noticed an increase in voter registration challenge cases over the past year, which are often filed by a single individual or entity on the basis that the voter may no longer reside at the address of registration,” said Matt Heckel, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of State. “These challenges are an attempt to circumvent the strict list maintenance processes mandated by state and federal law.”

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