Donald Trump's allies are developing new methods to potentially steal the 2024 election after removing a safeguard in several Republican-led states, according to a report.
Nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, after Trump allies targeted the multi-state database with conspiracy theories, and prominent election denier Cleta Mitchell has played a central role in persuading them to move away from that bipartisan security effort and instead use an open-source EagleAI software, reported Rolling Stone.
“Their voter lists are likely to be significantly less accurate,” said David Becker, a co-founder and former executive director of ERIC who left earlier this year following a right-wing pressure campaign. “There will be old records on the voter lists of people who are no longer eligible in the state that will fuel false claims of potential voter fraud, and there will be inaccurate records [of those] who are eligible in the state who moved within the state that they will likely not catch.”
Faulty voter lists create long lines at the polls, delay the return of mail-in ballots and create other obstacles to determining winners, Becker said, and that gives more space for losers to falsely claim the election had been stolen from them.
“The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers," he said.
ERIC was established in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts to help modernize outdated voter-registration data and give trustworthy information to remove deceased or ineligible voters, but EagleAI draws from public data sources such as newspaper obituaries and property tax records to allow activists to challenge thousands of voters at a time.
“The data sets that they’re looking to use, such as property-tax records, should not be used to generate a list of voters who are ineligible," said Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania's secretary of the commonwealth. “There’s any number of spouses who do not show up on property–tax records. No one who rents an apartment will show up on property-tax records.”
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That software is "utterly unreliable" and would result in huge numbers of challenges of properly registered and eligible voters, and he said lawsuits would almost certainly be filed against states or counties that use EagleAI, whose representatives claim hundreds of individuals and counties in 23 states have shown an interest.
Georgia's Republican-dominated Columbia County this month became the first government user of EagleAI, although the state's director of elections, Blake Evans, said earlier this year that the presentations he's seen for the tool were “confused and seem to steer counties towards unlawful list-maintenance activities.”