Voter Suppression: The Rise of Organized, Tech-Driven Mass Voter Challenges

by | Jul 10, 2024 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Photo by Mike Brusky, Openverse

Voter Suppression: The Rise of Organized, Tech-Driven Mass Voter Challenges

by | Jul 10, 2024 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Photo by Mike Brusky, Openverse

MAGA activists are relying on a constellation of dark money-backed software programs to generate thousands of voter challenges.

Republished with permission from Documented

Thousands of challenges to voter eligibility in Georgia. 10,000 challenges filed in Florida, with support from a top state election official. Activists in Michigan going door-to-door to question voters and flood local election offices with challenges.

These are not isolated incidents. Nor is it a coincidence that voter challenges like these are being filed in communities around the country.

Instead, these challenges are part of an organized, nationwide effort by election deniers and MAGA activists to generate mass voter challenges that can overwhelm election clerks, create unnecessary hurdles for eligible voters to cast ballots, and feed conspiracy theories that threaten public confidence in elections. These organized efforts are facilitated by an array of tech-driven, dark money-backed projects that can supercharge voter challenges.

Nationally, Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network (“EIN”) and True the Vote have backed competing software programs that compare voter rolls with public data sources to help activists generate local voter challenges with a few clicks. Similar software programs have also emerged on the state level, and are being used to manufacture voter challenges in states like Michigan and Ohio, in some cases after conducting a door-to-door canvass. In places like Iowa and Wisconsin, activists have developed their own distinct methods for generating voter challenges.

This report analyzes six national projects designed to facilitate mass voter challenges, as well as four efforts on the state level.

There are important distinctions between the different projects—from the data used, to the training provided, to the intended audiences and applications—and MAGA activists in different states are drawing from these resources for varying purposes.

However, the voter challenges generated by these ill-conceived, thinly-sourced projects are already beginning to flow. MAGA activists are aware that federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election—which in 2024, is August 7—and have been recruiting and training users for months, in anticipation of generating challenges over summer.

The development of these well-funded tools hint at how the election denial movement is maturing, evolving, and learning from some of its past mistakes.

In the 2022 election cycle, a handful of MAGA activists, mobilized by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, filed thousands of voter challenges in states like Georgia and Michigan. Those decentralized efforts were largely unsuccessful, with election officials rejecting non-individualized challenges filed in batches on spreadsheets, or based on limited data-matching techniques.

These new software programs and organizing efforts represent an effort to recalibrate. These projects are largely aimed at generating individualized challenges, and are often drawn from a broader range of data sources, in an attempt to sidestep guidance that thwarted earlier mass challenge efforts.

Top takeaways:

  • The most prominent national backers of mass voter challenge programs appear to be True the Vote and its new voter roll challenge software IV3, and the Election Integrity Network, which is largely backing Eagle AI software and whose Michigan and Ohio state affiliates are working with another software program, Check My Vote.
  • A new Florida-based group called The People’s Audit is also soliciting donations to purchase data from states and allow users to investigate voter rolls, and claims to be working in Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.
  • MAGA activists in states like Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Wisconsin are developing their own mass voter challenge projects, in some cases drawing from voter roll information made available by groups like VoteRef, a project of the billionaire-backed Restoration of America which hosts voter roll data for 32 states and the District of Columbia. These state-based groups are largely decentralized, but some receive support from fringe election denier Dr. Douglas Frank.
  • Approaches to investigating voter registrations differ. Activists in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin have used programs like Check My Vote and Eagle AI to identify addresses that they physically visit in a door-to-door canvass. True the Vote’s IV3 tells users that they may only conduct investigations remotely, and explicitly discourages contact with voters.
  • Almost every project is using purchased/open-source voter rolls and checking them against National Change of Address (“NCOA”)-sourced databases. This approach is seriously lacking, relies on outdated data, and generates false positives. It stands in contrast with the list maintenance services offered by the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC, which draws from an array of up-to-date data sources securely provided by states to reduce the chance of inaccurately flagging voters who shared the same name and birthdate, but are actually different people.
  • There is a degree of competition between the national programs, but in many instances, group leaders have described coordination with one another, and are at least dividing up turf. For example, Eagle AI is widely used in Georgia, Check My Vote in Michigan, and IV3 in other states. Many of these projects also interface with VoteRef. The decentralized nature of the election denial movement allows activists to pick-and-choose a program that fits their needs.
  • Mass voter challenge operations not only overwhelm election offices and feed disinformation, but can also lay the groundwork for litigation challenging election procedures or results. For example, a group called “Citizen AG” has described plans to coordinate with Eagle AI on pre-election lawsuits against Georgia counties that reject Eagle AI-generated voter challenges.
  • Some of these projects are also pushing to contest voter registrations without filing formal challenges. Check My Vote has been used to flag apparent data entry errors, such as registrations with missing apartment numbers or that may be duplicates. Eagle AI-generated lists of allegedly ineligible voters have been submitted to election officials in Georgia and Florida outside of the formal challenge process, in some cases prompting action. Nevada activists have also sought to informally challenge voters outside of that state’s limited window for filing formal challenges.
  • The money behind these operations is largely secret. Eagle AI’s tax-exempt arm has described plans to receive funding through Donors Trust, the “dark money ATM of the right.”
  • Voters should double-check their own status on the voter rolls and re-register if necessary. These organized efforts further underscore the need for Congress and the states to provide financial resources to local elections offices who are being forced to process these mass challenges on top of their already-overwhelming workloads.
Documented

Documented

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