Republican official's fraud hunt unravels as 'dead' voters all turn up alive

A Republican election board member in Georgia’s Forsyth County flagged four midterm voters as dead using a data tool built by election deniers, but all four are alive, ProPublica reported this week.

The board rejected the attempt to question their ballots.

Board member Max Clavijo belongs to the Election Integrity Network, the group led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who helped Trump try to reverse his 2020 defeat. Using a tool called ELLY, built by fellow network member Rick Richards, Clavijo questioned the eligibility of 69 voters. He claimed some had moved, some had voter ID problems and some had registered under fake names, according to ProPublica. The majority of the 69, 38 in all, involved voters registered under a first initial. Several of them told ProPublica that’s simply how they go by their names.

The obituaries submitted for the four “dead” voters didn’t line up with their voter records, and each placed the deceased person outside the county. ProPublica tracked down the voters, including night-shift nurse Alexis Ramirez, who voted early.

“It’s kind of crazy that they attempted to do that without trying to prove it first,” she said.

“I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it’s false. I’m alive. I’m here,” said fellow voter Chris Strickland.

Clavijo told the board he wasn’t formally challenging any ballots, only trying to clean up the rolls, and Richards said the same. But other board members said activists were using Clavijo to sidestep the formal challenge process. Under questioning, Clavijo conceded he couldn’t vouch for the data.

“I did not make any explicit accusation that the information was 100% correct,” he said.

His cover letter acknowledged the data hadn’t been checked by a human, according to people familiar with the matter. Clavijo didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions. Richards dismissed complaints about ELLY’s accuracy as nonsense and said it’s up to county workers to verify its data. Mitchell didn’t respond to questions about her group’s plans for the tool.

ELLY has come under fire in the past. The Cherokee County election director found that it falsely flagged the wife of a local election board member as possibly dead. Before the midterms, network participants outlined plans to use ELLY to contest ballots it deemed suspicious, ProPublica reported.

The report comes after Democrats swept Georgia’s statewide offices last week.