American Oversight Hosts Virtual Panel on the Campaign to Dismantle ERIC

On Tuesday, American Oversight hosted a virtual event that drew renewed attention to how the election denial movement and far-right misinformation pushed nine states to reject the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center. 

Experts from All Voting is Local, the Brennan Center, the Campaign Legal Center, and American Oversight examined the anti-voter networks pushing the withdrawals from ERIC and the grave impact that exodus presents for voting rights and election administration during this year’s election. The virtual event, a full transcript and video from which is below, built upon American Oversight’s in-depth investigation and our comprehensive report “The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC.”

The discussion emphasized that the attacks on ERIC were launched by the same people who tried to undermine faith in the results of the 2020 election. For example, the Election Integrity Network — a group founded by Cleta Mitchell, a longtime proponent of voting restrictions who aided former President Trump in his attempt to remain in power — was a primary force behind states withdrawing from ERIC. 

Brad Ashwell, the state director at All Voting is Local Florida, described the network of groups challenging election administration as a “multi-headed hydra” seeking to make it harder to vote.

“It is a centrally directed network feeding out into grassroot networks … to flood local county boards and election offices to create the impression that there is a groundswell against voter list maintenance like ERIC,” added Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center.

The panelists also talked about the effectiveness of ERIC and their concerns about states no longer being able to benefit from the system. “ERIC has been a bipartisan success story,” Diaz said. “You have election officials in states across the country … using this system because the one thing every election official can agree on is that they want to have as accurate of voter rolls as possible.” 

Deputy Executive Director Chioma Chukwu detailed how American Oversight’s investigation confirmed that several states that withdrew from ERIC have entered into or discussed entering into data-sharing agreements that are all subject to different terms. 

Election denial activists are now “pushing for snake oil systems to replace ERIC,” said Alissa Lopez, American Oversight’s director of strategic partnerships, which present alarming implications for voting rights ahead of the 2024 election.

For example, ​​EagleAI is a database used by right-wing activists on the hunt for voter fraud. Andrew Garber, democracy counsel at the Brennan Center, discussed how programs like EagleAI can be used to disenfranchise voters based on flawed or incomplete data. “It’s set up to facilitate removing voters from the rolls” by allowing other individuals to issue voter-registration challenges. 

Chukwu also pointed to communications American Oversight uncovered in which state officials entertained proposals about software called Omega4America, a company created by election denier Jay Valentine, who was active in efforts to discredit the 2020 election in Wisconsin. Similarly, an app created by voter-fraud alarmist group True the Vote called IV3 “effectively allows private citizens to challenge voter registration even from their cell phones,” and fraud activists have also used VoteRef, an organization run by newly elected Arizona Republican Party chair and former Trump campaign organizer Gina Swoboda, to challenge registrations. 

Programs like VoteRef are regularly used by election vigilantes to lodge mass registration challenges, and as recent reporting shows, Trump allies have ramped up campaigns to target voter rolls in several states. “If you have election officials abandoning the most reliable sources of data in favor of sources that are incomplete or mistached … that significantly increases the risk of flagging or removing an actual eligible voter that still resides in the state from the voter rolls,” Diaz said. 

The event concluded with a discussion of ways people can stay informed about threats to elections and help ensure the 2024 election is free and fair. This includes, as Ashwell noted, pushing back against laws that allow organizations to enter into contracts that don’t prioritize data protection. And Alex Gulotta, the director of All Voting is Local Arizona, added that having a robust network to counter election sabotage is essential. He is encouraged by evidence of a pro-voter movement in places standing up to election deniers across the country. 

A transcript of the event is below. It has been lightly edited for clarity.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Alissa Lopez and I am the strategic partnerships director at American Oversight and I’m incredibly excited to be moderating this panel with you all and the question and answer to follow.

I’m going to start off with a little bit about American oversight, some housekeeping notes, and then introduce our amazing panelists.

So for those of you who don’t know and are not familiar with American Oversight, we are a nonpartisan watchdog organization that is working to advance truth, accountability, and democracy by enforcing the public’s right to government records.

We consider ourselves open record specialists who work with partners and media outlets to make sure that the public is well-informed.

We particularly work on voting rights and democracy, but a bunch of other issues as well like threats to education and reproductive rights.

I’m very, very excited that we are being joined today by several amazing panelists and experts in democracy and voting rights.

And so I’m going to start with introducing Alex. Alex Gulotta is the state director with All Voting is Local in Arizona where he leads state democracy work and works with local and national partners. He brings more than 30 years of experience as a poverty law advocate and more than 20 years as a nonprofit executive director.

We are also very lucky to have Andrew Garber here from the Brennan Center. He is counsel with the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program and he comes with a background of experience in a wide range of pro-bono matters, and he previously served as a clerk to Senator Chris Coons on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We also have another panelist from All Voting is Local, Brad Ashwell. He is All Voting is Locals’ Florida State Director, where he leads state democracy work across Florida with local and national partners. He has 15 years of state and federal legislative experience with nonprofit advocacy groups working to improve election administration systems and voter access.

We also have my colleague, Chioma Chukwu. She is our deputy executive director where she works to American Oversight’s key priorities within and across internal teams and with external partners. She previously served on the senior management team of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Prior to that she served as a senior advisor to the late representative Elijah Cummings who chaired the committee. Chioma was a proud member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. 

And last but certainly not least, we have Jonathan Diaz from the Campaign Legal Center. Jonathan is the director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center where he helps lead CLC’s work on combating election manipulation and litigates voting rights cases across the country. Prior to joining CLC, Jonathan was a litigation associate in the New York office of Jenner and Block LLP.

Now I’m gonna turn it over to my colleague Chioma to set the stage for us.

Chioma Chukwu, Deputy Executive Director, American Oversight

Thank you so much, Alyssa, and thank you so much to everyone for joining us today.

We are so incredibly excited to be here with you all to discuss a matter of such great public importance. As many of you know, American Oversight has been tracking a nationwide network of election deniers and they’re growing influence on government officials.

Guided by our philosophy that a strengthened democracy requires an informed electorate, American Oversight has been aggressively investigating and obtaining and releasing public records that shed light on the election denier’s efforts to undermine confidence in US elections. Our investigations have included our work to obtain key documents in the fake electors scheme following the 2020 presidential election.

Our work has also included the post-election “audits” launched by officials in battleground states like Wisconsin and Arizona.

And of course, our work has included the work that we’ve done in ERIC, the dangerous attacks and the ensuing withdrawals from ERIC.

Last November, our work on ERIC culminated in a report which is the subject of our webinar today. The title is the “Campaign to Dismantle ERIC.”

Our report relied on thousands of pages of public records uncovered through our public records requests as well as litigation and public reporting as well as input from experts, all of which told an incredible story of how these election deniers have engaged in a coordinated campaign to target ERIC as part of their ongoing efforts to undermine our democracy.

Our report included the following findings for those who are unfamiliar. First, the anti-ERIC campaign was based on conspiracy theories and lies that were pushed by election deniers who falsely claimed that ERIC was a [George] Soros funded left-wing voter registration drive aimed at helping Democrats win elections. Documents that American Oversight obtained illustrate how the attacks proliferated after a fringe website called Gateway Pundit published false claims about the bipartisan consortium.

Our report also found that the same people who are responsible for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, such as Trump advisor and election attorney Cleta Mitchell, are also the same people who’ve been working behind the scenes to influence the ERIC exodus and push conspiracy theories.

Another one of our key findings is that the states that ultimately caved to political pressure by withdrawing from ERIC have since scrambled to find viable ERIC replacements. And what this means is that of those potential replacements that have been identified, none of them — not even one — provides the same level of security, reliability, or effectiveness as ERIC.

And our final key finding is that election denial activists who have been bolstered by the likes of Clet Mitchell are now pushing their own ERIC alternatives, some of which double as voter fraud hunting tools, which can make it easier for these election vigilantes to challenge the voting rights of thousands in November and beyond.

By targeting ERIC, election denialists have set the stage for post-election chaos and confusion. In other words, these actors are creating fertile ground to spread more baseless claims of voter fraud and make it easier to potentially challenge and deny the election results this November.

We’re just a few months away from one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime. But our work is far from done. American Oversight will continue to track and expose the impact of state withdrawals from ERIC and other actions that threaten voting rights and US elections, all of which are pillars of US democracy.

Now before I turn it back to our moderator, I want to acknowledge the other organizations who’ve made today’s convening possible.

First, we are incredibly grateful to our panelists, Jonathan Diaz, Andrew Garber, Alex Galletta, and Brad Ashwell, who graciously agreed to provide time and expertise for this webinar as well as our ongoing ERIC work. We are incredibly thankful to our partners at Documented, Common Cause, Protect Democracy, and States United for their ongoing support and their important contributions to our report.

We also thank you and the many other state and local election experts who have shared updates and information about the ongoing threats to ErIC as well as the election administration landscape more generally.

And finally, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the critically important work of media outlets like Votebeat that have continued to shine light on the campaign to dismantle ERIC and that have made it possible for organizations like American Oversight and many of you all to counter these public attacks, helping us inch closer to preventing and protecting our democracy. And with that, I’ll turn it back to you, Alissa.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Thank you so much Chioma. So really excited to dive into this conversation starting with learning a little bit more about ERIC.

So many attendees are likely aware of ERIC, the nonpartisan voting administration tool that allows for interstate voter verification. But Andrew, could you tell us a little more about how ERIC functions and its importance in election administration?

Andrew Garber, Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice

Absolutely, yes. And thank you very much to the American Oversight team for putting together this conversation and inviting us to be part of it.

So ERIC is the nonpartisan election administration tool as you noted whose main goals are to improve the accuracy of state voting rolls which in turn allows people to make sure that people on the rolls, the people who are voting, are who they say they are. So, it was founded about a decade ago by a number of different states whose chief election administrators were people from both of the major political parties.

And what ERIC does at its core is it collects data from different state sources like election boards, departments of motor vehicles, as well as other sources such as the Post Office change of address form — that thing you fill out if you ever want your mail forwarded. It looks at social security death records.

And the states compile reports of people who may no longer be eligible to vote where they were previously registered and they’re able to send those to other states to alert the states that perhaps someone who moved in to a state is no longer eligible in their prior state of residence. Those states can then go through their regular processes to update their voter roles. 

And what’s really important to note here is that the National Voter Registration Act does require states to have programs to keep their voter rolls up to date, but it puts limitations on it. And the primary limitation I think that’s important to know is if you’re going to remove someone from the rolls because you think they moved out of state, the state needs to send them a notice. Then either the person needs to respond to the notice and say, that’s correct, I moved, you can take me off the rolls. Or if the person doesn’t respond, the state has to wait two federal election cycles and if the person doesn’t vote, if the person doesn’t interact with state voter registration agencies in that time, only then can the state remove the person from the rolls as a result.

So ERIC is something that facilitates that process and helps states keep their voter rolls up to date. Importantly, ERIC has a lot of data protection and security programs in place. It heavily encrypts data and in doing so, it’s able to amass information on people that is reliable in determining that someone perhaps should be removed from the voter rolls. Information that allows for matching across databases beyond just someone’s first and last name, because obviously that runs into all sorts of concerns. Multiple people can have the same name, often people in the same family have the same or very similar names. By being able to use additional information that shouldn’t be public — like drivers license numbers like social security numbers — ERIC is able to significantly increase its accuracy and its precision.

ERIC has one other important function which is that it can help states identify people who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered, and in turn allows states to do outreach to those people. So ERIC both helps states keep their voter rolls up to date, clean them up as people move out of state where the state otherwise would not have known that that person had moved, and it’s helped get people registered to vote.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Thank you. That is incredibly helpful. Jonathan, I wanted to ask you a little bit about concerns that advocacy groups and CLC might have related to states leaving ERIC and some of the possible impacts that we could see in those states or other states.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships, Campaign Legal Center

Yeah, thank you, AlIssa. As Chioma and Andrew kind of described, the real strength of ERIC is that it is a kind of government-to-government partnership.

State sources exchanging data that they have in their possession and that they have verified with each other, to strengthen voter rolls not only in their states, but in all of ERIC member states. And so the more states that participate in the program, the more effective the program can be because the more reliable sources of data you have when you’re updating your voter rolls.

And so when a state like Iowa, for example, withdraws from participation in the program, that not only limits Iowa’s ability to maintain effective voter rolls using the data from other states,

it also cuts off Iowa’s data from the states who remain in the program being able to use it. And so every time a state leaves the program stops participating in ERIC, it makes the program overall less effective for everybody else.

And then as Andrew mentioned, under the National Voter Registration Act federal law, every state is required to take certain steps to maintain accurate and up-to-date voter rolls. And so those states that have withdrawn from ERIC and are no longer able to use reliable, secure sources of data from the other states still have to maintain accurate voter rolls. And so I think my biggest concern is that the states that can no longer take advantage of this interstate partnership will turn to less reliable or less secure methods of trying to determine who on their rolls is no longer eligible. 

And so you know, it’s kind of a two- headed problem where it’s weakening the overall system for everybody else who remains in it and also is limiting the ability of those states that are withdrawn to use the best and most reliable methods of maintaining clean voter rolls.

Something that Chioma hinted at in her kind of initial description of ERIC that I really want to highlight is that ERIC really has been for the last 10 years or so a bipartisan success story. You have election officials in states across the country — big states, small states, red states, blue states, every state in between — using this system because the one thing that I think every election official can agree on is that they all want to have as accurate a voter rolls as possible.

ERIC really allowed them to make sure that they were not only keeping their roles up to date by removing voters who had left the state or who had died, but also reaching out to eligible and unregistered voters so they were capturing as much of the eligible voting population in their state as possible.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Thank you. That’s incredibly important and we’ll talk a little bit about these alternatives to ERIC later but I wanted to pivot a little bit to the anti-voter network that is pushing for this exodus.

My question is for Alex and Brad with All Voting is Local. Pivoting to the vast network of anti-voter groups and individuals who are pushing for states to leave ERIC, can you tell us a little bit about this movement in your respective states?

Alex Gulotta, Director, All Voting is Local Arizona

Yeah, so I’ll start with Arizona. In Arizona, there was a bill in the 2023 legislative session SB 1135 and that bill never mentioned ERIC, but it did two things. It made it illegal for the state or any governmental political subdivision to share voter registration information with other states.

And then it also made it illegal to join or enter into an agreement with any organization that requires the state to reach out to eligible but not registered voters. So it basically didn’t say ERIC, but it said ERIC, right? It basically made participation in ERIC illegal. That bill passed our legislature and our governor, Governor [Katie] Hobbs, vetoed it.

When she vetoed it, she specifically said “it’s unfortunate that many in the legislature continue to fan the flames of false allegations of voter fraud, yet send to my desk a bill that would prevent Arizona from joining organizations that actually help improve the integrity of our elections. Arizonans deserve legislation that promotes free and fair elections, not the opposite.”

Right? And so this bill was vetoed. Arizona is still part of ERIC but into the fall we started seeing groups showing up at boards of supervisors meetings in local counties. On September 26, 2023, a group showed up at Gila County in at the Board of Supervisors meeting and amongst other things they were trying to pressure the board of supervisors from eliminating emergency voting and reducing or removing ballot drop-off locations. But added to their litany at that point in time is opting out of ERIC or encouraging the county to use their authority not to participate in sharing their data.

Well the way the data is shared in Arizona, it’s actually congregated and all of the counties except for Maricopa and Pima are part of a statewide database. So the county wasn’t able to keep its data back. But that’s what was being encouraged, to ask the board to not participate in the system that allows us to clean our voter rolls. So I’ll pass it over to Brad to talk some about what happened in Florida.

Brad Ashwell, State Director, All Voting is Local Florida

Thanks, Alex. Florida is a little different. Our Secretary of State, he’s appointed by the governor, he serves at the governor’s pleasure. Governor Desantis has been really catering to election conspiracy folks and activists for the last few years.

So it basically came out of the blue. Last March, I believe it was the nineteenth, [the] secretary of state announced that he was leaving ERIC, all of our supervisors of elections said that they were blindsided by it.

We started looking further into it and I have to tip my hat to Document it and groups like American Oversight who have been unveiling a lot of what’s been happening behind the scenes and have been instrumental to our understanding of what’s happening and the different players in it. We started to see a better picture of the fabric, the network of these groups and how they’re working together. 

Our earliest window into this was a group who was doing a lot of door knocking and presenting lists of voters to supervisors to remove and they had chapters in many counties. Defend Florida is its name. It’s interesting because this group is probably — it’s kind of the linchpin at this point.

They are doing legislative work. They’re working at the administrative level and state rulemaking, they’re attending county commission meetings. Every time there’s a local ordinance or something relating to elections, they have people there.

So, you know, they clearly are coordinating poll watchers who will be inside the polls for this coming election cycle.

So we have this entity. And then there are other groups that are more clearly aligned with the election integrity network. And again, we know that because of our friends at Documented and American Oversight. Quick plug. 

The Florida Fair Elections Coalition was a group we discovered was instrumental in pushing Secretary Byrd to leave ERIC and they’ve been involved with all sorts of other things. This actually created a lot of coalition confusion at one point because there’s another organization by the exact same name that’s been active in the state for well over a decade. And we got really concerned at one point. We thought that this same group was one of our coalition partners attending all of our meetings and we had to kind of figure that out. 

I guess the bottom line is you have a number of different types of groups, groups that are forming these county chapters and working at every level of government, these other organizations that seem  like they’re an arm of the election integrity network.

And then there’s other groups that are kind of similar forming chapters working at the local level like Citizens for Defending Freedom and Florida Citizens Alliance. And they seem to be working a little more at influencing party infrastructure and political infrastructure and they’re getting local party executive committees to file ordinance or resolutions supporting things like hand counting of ballots and pressuring supervisors of elections, our local election officials in Florida, to remove certain voters from the rolls. 

I should say, one of the things that is really disturbing about this whole network is the way it can pivot, whether it be this effort to pressure the state to leave ERIC, efforts to support legislation, or efforts to file mass frivolous challenges or any number of things. They seem to be working in concert with other groups on the far-right. 

We have a good example of that in Sarasota, Florida where we kind of have a hotbed. It’s the home of the Cyber Ninjas, Mms for Liberty was founded there. The Proud Boys have a large presence there. Michael Flynn in the America Project is based there. So, it’s sort of like this multi-tiered, multi-headed Hydra that we’re seeing being built out and our challenge is really to build out a network that can monitor it and track it but also get ahead of it and combat it. 

I should say all these groups have in common a platform pushing for all in-person voting on the day of election with hand counts. So, her vision is to not have any vote-by-mail, to not have any early voting, everybody piling up on election day. And, and somehow, magically, supervisors are supposed to produce quick results that night by hand counting everything which is just crazy pants. So, I think I’ll stop there. That’s pretty much the dark lay of the land.

Allissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

We will close out on a positive note for folks who want to engage and fight back against anti-voter work.

You know, you spoke a little bit to some of the national actors who are playing a part and I actually wanted to ask Jonathan who are some of the key actors at the Nation level who are pushing this exodus from ERIC and empowering anti-voter election administration efforts?

We’ll talk a little bit about alternatives to ERIC and what they’re peddling in the next section, but I’m a little bit curious to see who Campaign Legal Center is looking at in terms of some of these key groups and individuals.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships, Campaign Legal Center

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve already as a group mentioned some of the key figures behind this sort of national push to get states to withdraw from ERIC, in particular the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, who is a former advisor to President Trump and was one of the key legal architects of the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results.

There’s been a lot of really great work by our friends at American Oversight and Documented and elsewhere, kind of mapping out the network of election deniers and the sometimes very well hidden sources of funding for these groups that are really pushing — as Brad described — to dismantle many different parts of our electoral system in order to make it harder to not just vote, but to run elections.

And so it is very much a centrally directed kind of network feeding content and arguments out into these grassroots groups that have seemingly popped up everywhere almost overnight to flood local county boards and election offices to try and create the impression that there is some kind of public groundswell against reliable methods of voter list maintenance like ERIC.

And so what we have seen over and over again in the states that have withdrawn is an effort targeting the political actors in the states. Secretaries of state or governors — people who are at a high level and are maybe closer to the political apparatus in their state as opposed to local election administrators who are often the ones who are actually doing the hard work of maintaining the voter roles and who know how this process actually works and who have benefited from the reliable, secure data that they’ve gotten from ERIC over the years.

So you’ll see bipartisan coalitions of local election officials who sometimes don’t agree on a lot coming together to say, no, we need this. This is a really valuable tool for us in administering elections.

But the pressure that Election Integrity Network and Cleta Mitchell and Heather Honey and other other folks in that orbit have put on local election officials and on statewide election officials is really powerful — so much so that secretaries of state in a handful of states including Secretary [Paul] Pate in Iowa and also in Ohio.

Those are states where the secretaries had praised ERIC and talked about what a valuable tool it was for election integrity, how necessary it was for them to maintain accurate voter roles, only to turn around in the face of the political pressure that they were receiving and withdraw their states from what they had previously described as this excellent kind of essential program.

So it is all coordinated by many of the same folks who have been attacking the institutions of our elections, since 2020 and even before that.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

That is incredibly helpful context and information. You know, we know that these anti-voter activists are pushing for snake oil systems to replace ERIC, and that vigilantism is being promoted in states where there is now an ERIC vacuum.

Andrew, could you tell us a little bit about these alternatives to ERIC and what has happened across various states?

Andrew Garber, Democracy Counsel, Brennan Center

Sure. I’m probably primarily gonna talk about EagleAI, which is a tool, software, spelled Eagle AI. They apparently pronounced it “Eagle Eye” — a little bit of an affront to spelling as well as to election administration.

But this is a software that its own founder has called Excel on steroids and it purports to do a very similar job to what ERIC does, which is to amass information and determine which people based on information are no longer eligible to remain on the voter rolls in a state.

However, it does so in a way that is much less reliable than ERIC and based on reporting we’ve seen, including some great work from our friends at Documented on this topic as well, it looks like they’re trying to work their way into contracts with government agencies, county boards of election, state secretaries of state offices and the like, to insert themselves into the process of maintaining voter roles and so that presents a number of concerns.

So at its core, what Eagle Eye does is it scrapes the web for information that is somewhat relevant to the voter rolls such as those change of address forms from the Post Office, obituaries, things like property records.

And while these sort of data sources might not be wrong, they aren’t sufficient for the purpose of determining who should be removed from the voter rolls.

People want their mail forwarded even though they want to continue to vote at their permanent address all the time. They go to college. They’re serving in the military away from homes somewhere. They’re on a work assignment or taking care of a family member for a number of weeks or months. That doesn’t mean they’re no longer eligible to vote at home. 

So if you just use the change of address forms, you’re going to catch a number of people who remain eligible to vote and you’re going to be disenfranchising those people if they get kicked off the rolls.

Same with things like tax records and property records. People often live in homes they don’t own and they own homes they don’t live in so those aren’t good determinants of where someone is eligible to vote.

It seems that EagleAI also just doesn’t have enough safeguards to make sure that people are the same people. Again, it’s not uncommon for two people to have the same name even if you’re factoring in a middle initial. If that’s all you’re looking at, you might be removing the wrong person from the rolls.

What is more concerning or additionally concerning about this tool is that it is set up to facilitate removing people from the roles, otherwise known as voter challenges. Basically every state has a process that allows for citizens to challenge the eligibility of other voters to remain on the rolls or to cast a ballot.

Most states have a number of safeguards to protect against disenfranchisement such as every time a voter challenge is brought, the person has to fill out an affidavit — which is a form that you sign under penalty perjury — or they have to have a personal knowledge about the person they’re challenging or in some cases only election workers can bring these challenges.

But not all states have such wide safeguards. Georgia in particular allows for as many challenges as someone wants to bring at once, the only limitation being they have to live in the county where they’re bringing the challenges.

EagleAI has functionality where it will highlight rows of people that it thinks should be challenged again for reasons like it thinks this person filled out a change of address for or there’s perhaps a typo in the voter file and so their name doesn’t match exactly what it should or their address doesn’t match exactly what it should. This does happen, it’s good to catch, but people should never be removed from the rolls because there’s a typo in the voter file.

And in a couple of clicks, [EagleAI] allows a person to submit a challenge to the county board and in particular, it holds all those challenges and submits them all at once 10 days before the county board’s next election, which creates a massive headache for election administrators who have to go through this in a very short period of time. 

So if these tools are able to be used in place of things like ERIC to maintain voter rolls it means there’s a significant likelihood that people will be wrongly disenfranchised or removed from the rolls. It means that there’s a significant likelihood that election administrators will be burdened with a ton of work and they have enough to do already.

And so I’ll pause there so we can move on to other panelists and questions, but, It’s definitely conservatives.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Definitely. You know, beyond EagleAI, we know that there are other supposed processes and tools that American Oversight and other organizations are tracking and I wanted to know, Chioma, if you could tell us a little bit about these other ERIC alternatives, so to speak, that are cropping up.

Chioma Chuku, Deputy Executive Director, American Oversight

Sure, thank you, Alissa. So I’ll start with one that we have seen and have publicly announced and reported on and also was confirmed by our investigation.

And this is these interstate data sharing agreements. So our investigation confirmed that several of the states that withdrew from ERIC have entered into these or discussed entering into these cross-state data sharing agreements, which was an effort that was led in part by the Ohio secretary of state’s office, to convene states to discuss how to exchange publicly available voter registration data, names, address, dates of birth, gender, voter registration history.

While this information is certainly helpful to an extent, it’s certainly not the universe of information that would allow states to be able to properly and accurately maintain voter lists.

Our investigation revealed that one of the first of these agreements that was entered into was between Georgia and South Carolina. And then shortly after that, Georgia entered into a separate agreement with Alabama.

Public reports had confirmed that Ohio had reached a similar agreement with Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, and Alabama. We also know that Alabama had announced plans to work with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Virginia also announced that it was going to partner with Georgia, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Washington, DC.

So while this is again something that we know is happening in real time — many of the states have entered into these agreements — I will note that these agreements all are subject to different terms, different security arrangements, and there’s no common quality control, which is extremely concerning. 

Another ERIC alternative is Omega4America. This might be something that many of you have heard of which was pushed by a man named Jay Valentine. It is a web-based fractal technology that was created to essentially quickly identify fraud by matching voter data with property tax records, death records, and other large databases. And it effectively allows private citizens to challenge voter registrations even from their cell phones. So that shows you how secure this is.

Jay Valentine notably was once incredibly active in the post-2020 presidential election denial efforts in Wisconsin. And interestingly, he’s also a frequent contributor to Gateway Pundit. So the fact that he has been working behind the scenes to push this particular product where ERIC is no longer a viable option for states that have withdrawn suggests that they’re certainly nefarious motives at play.

Valentine funded this project by Mike Lindell, who is the CEO of MyPillow and who we all know is a prominent conspiracy theorist and a part of Trump’s inner circle.

Our investigation revealed that Valentine, who had publicly railed against ERIC prior to Texas withdrawing from ERIC, was pushing state legislators and the secretary of state to adopt Omega4America, saying that it is the most comprehensive alternative to ERIC that could help clean up his voter rolls.

And finally, documents that we obtained during our investigation shows that Omega4America extended beyond Texas. In Arizona,for example, we have records that show that state senators Wendy Rogers and John Cavanaugh — who are active in the Senate-led, Cyber Ninjas-contracted sham “audit” — had contacted Gina Swoboda, who we all know is now the newly elected chair of the Republican Party in Arizona, to ask Swoboda what her thoughts were on this particular program, Omega4America.

So we know that this certainly has tentacles. We have not seen Omega4America adopted anywhere, but we certainly know that it has caught the attention of state legislators across several states.

And the last technology or ERIC alternative that I will note is VoterRef. VoterRef is a web-based application of the Voter Reference Foundation. Voter Reference Foundation claims Gina Swoboda as its executive director and it has long been a tool that is used to lodge mass voter registration challenges under the guise of helping to clean voter rolls.

We know that there’s also True the Vote. They have a new web-based application called IV3. True the Vote is led by Catherine Engelbrecht. We anticipate that it will be primed for use by vigilantes seeking to also challenge voter registrations under the auspices of trying to clean up voter rolls.

So those are some technologies that we’ve seen pushed and we anticipate will play a critical role in the upcoming election.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Thank you. It sounds like there are a lot of pretty crappy alternatives out there. And you know, one thing that’s clear is that these are new “technologies” that are untested.

I wanted to know Jonathan if you could tell us about any concerns that you all have at Campaign Legal Center related to these supposed alternatives.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships, Campaign Legal Center

One clarification that I want to make to the way that you framed that question is that a lot of these are not actually new technologies. A lot of these are strategies or processes of matching databases that have been around for a really long time and that are just trying to replace the most effective version of that, which was ERIC, which allowed the states to just directly exchange records with each other and directly flag when somebody had moved and things like that.

The reason that we’re referring to all of these other systems as ERIC alternatives is because none of them are as good. If publicly available commercial data was the best we had then election officials would have no choice but to rely on that. But it’s not the best we have. And so the danger of relying on some of these untested software or processes or these programs that are just aggregating commercial databases or obituaries from local newspapers (which are vanishing across the country) — that’s not a super reliable way to track whether a voter is deceased.

These are just not reliable sources. And so if you have election officials, abandoning the most reliable sources of data in favor of sources that are incomplete or that are mismatched or that don’t have all the necessary data points that you need to accurately match up with your voter roles and make sure that you’re talking about the same person, that significantly increases the risk of flagging or removing an actual eligible voter who still resides in the state from the voter rolls. 

And there are all kinds of policy and legal reasons why you don’t want to do that. You’re making it harder for that individual voter to participate in the political process if they have to reregister or if they have to respond to a voter registration challenge that is baseless. You’re putting a lot of strain on the electoral system. Election officials are under-resourced across the country. They don’t have enough money or enough personnel to do all the things that they have to do to make sure our elections run smoothly. So by facilitating these mass challenges that come from external sources and rely on shoddy data, election officials can’t under state law most times can’t just ignore those challenges. They have to process them, have to evaluate them, they have to decide if they’re valid or not and that takes time — time away from things like setting up polling places, like registering voters, like preparing to send out mail ballots. 

And so it’s the timing of these challenges when they come very close to election day when election officials are stretched the most thin that causes the most strain on the system. And the more faulty the data and the less reliable sources that election officials have to rely on when they’re doing their list maintenance procedures, the more likely it is that they’re either going to remove an eligible voter from the rolls or are gonna miss an actually ineligible voter.

Part of this process is not just keeping everybody on the rolls forever, it’s making sure that when you have actual confirmation from good data that a voter is deceased or has moved to another state and registered there that you remove that voter to keep your rolls clean. Abandoning ERIC makes both sides of that job harder.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

That is incredibly helpful. We know that these alternatives to ERIC are popping up in many states and of course at the local level like county levels and I wanted to know, Chioma, if you could tell us about some of the states and counties where we’re seeing this. I know Brad, you had mentioned specific counties, so if there any that we miss, would love to hear what you’re seeing in Florida.

Chioma Chuku, Deputy Executive Director, American Oversight

Sure. So I’ll start by focusing on Texas, which as I mentioned, Jay Valentine has been pushing his fractal technology in Texas.

We actually obtained documents from the Texas secretary of state that showed that prior to Texas’ withdrawal from ERIC, scores of Texas residents were actually emailing the office of the secretary of state as well as state legislators pushing for the state to abandon ERIC and use Omega4America.

Another example is Georgia. Georgia is an ERIC member state and we have no indication at present that Georgia plans to abandon ERIC, but there is at least one county within Georgia that has active steps to contract with an “ERIC alternative,” which is EagleAI, which was explained earlier.

That’s according to some draft contracts that we obtained between Columbia County and EagleAI. Specifically, records that we obtained show that in December 2023, Columbia County voted to use EagleAI despite warnings from voting rights experts and the state elections board that the system could not be trusted to provide reliable information.

And notably, we also obtained records that revealed that 2 months prior to the county voting to enter into this agreement, there was actually a security risk. EagleAI servers had actually become inoperable due to a potential attack on the Windows server.

So not only can EagleAI not be trusted because of the information that it relies on, but there’s also incredibly difficult security risks that are attached with actually using it in and of itself.

And I wanted to turn it over to Jonathan to talk a little bit about some work that American Oversight and CLC have partnered on that’s digging a little bit more into Columbia County’s work in contracting with EagleAI.

Jonathan Diaz, Director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships, Campaign Legal Center

Sure, thanks, Chioma. And so although Georgia remains a member of ERIC, Georgia has also taken other steps that make it more difficult for local electron administrators and officials to do their jobs and to effectively administer our elections.

Among those is a ban on any non-government funding for election administration. That was done in response to many of the grants that were handed out by foundations and other institutional donors during the 2020 election to help election offices respond to the pandemic and buy PPE for their election workers and volunteers.

But through some of the documents that were uncovered by American Oversight and Documented, we learned that founders of EagleAI — working again in conjunction with Cleta Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network — had offered use of the service to Columbia County, Georgia, initially for free and no charge and then later for a flat rate of I think it was $2,000.

So that seemed to us to be a clear violation of Georgia’s new ban on private funding for elections, essentially an in-kind donation to the county to help it administer its elections and conduct its legal function of maintaining accurate voter rolls.

So working with American Oversight, we sent a letter to the state Elections Board notifying them of the terms of this contract between Columbia County and EagleAI and the kind of history of their negotiations with each other where the founder, Dr. [Rick] Richards, and Cleta Mitchell had basically said in a meeting with the county board that they wanted to offer it for free but technically they couldn’t so they wanted charge the county a nominal fee to get around this restriction.

If Georgia is going to prevent counties from working with reliable private entities and taking the resources from reliable sources to administer their elections, then certainly they should also prevent unreliable programs and sources from circumventing this ban on private election funding to make their elections worse. And so we did flag that for the state Board of Elections for investigation.

The state elections director of Georgia, which remains a member of ERIC, has been very vocal about how critical the the program is to Georgia maintaining its clean election rolls as has Secretary Raffensperger and they told the county that this was a bad idea. So we’re hopeful that if Georgia election officials are going to have to live with this ban on outside funding and support that they should at least be able to use it to prevent bad actors and unreliable data sources from infecting their list maintenance process.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

That’s incredibly helpful. So I want to be mindful of time and I want to make sure that we end on a high note before going to question and answer because it is not all doom and gloom. All of the organizations on this call and many of you all are engaged in really important advocacy and transparency initiatives throughout 2024 to make sure that we can remain a viable democracy for now and beyond.

So I want to ask this question of our friends at All Voting is Local. As mentioned earlier, there are states leaving ERIC and that could have an impact on election administration in 2024.

What work are you all doing and how can people on this call stay informed about attacks on ERIC, threats to the election, and get involved in making sure that the 2024 elections are free and fair for all voters.

Brad Ashwell, State Director, All Voting is Local Florida

I was all doom and gloom earlier, so I guess I’ll try to bring up the sunshine and get a little more positive.

In Florida we are very active in regards to meeting with our supervisors of elections and work with our partners to make sure local folks are meeting with their local officials.

This is going to be one of the main ways we monitor the different types of list maintenance activities, the different types of efforts to challenge voters in the different systems in place that could either make that easier or harder. So, a lot of what we’re doing is trying to get ahead of it and work with those supervisors of elections to make sure they know what our concerns are and have checks in place to make sure that problems don’t happen.

Everybody has different legislative cycles, but one thing we’ve been doing is monitoring legislation along these lines. In Florida, the governor just signed a bill last week. It allows data to be used and kind of skirt all the protections they put in place and the statutes for ERIC.

It’s really important for all of us to fight back when we see these laws moving that allow states to enter these MOUs and contracts without core principles like data protections and quality control systems in place. 

One thing we’re in the process of standing up right now is a more robust effort for monitoring list maintenance. Everything from public records requests to data analysis to outreach to voters impacted. And then long term advocacy goals, making sure we’re working with the secretary of state and others as far as what they’ll use to replace ERIC because as Jonathan highlighted, there really isn’t anything yet that can adequately replace it. 

Alex Gulotta, Director, All Voting is Local Arizona

I would just add having the robust network to counter election sabotage is critical and really to have folks organized around that. 

Increasingly, we’re seeing real evidence of a pro-voter movement and folks on the ground in places like Cochise County and Mojave County and other places where there historically have not been people speaking out as much against the election deniers, really starting to stand up and speak out. I think people realize if you value your early voting, if you value your mail-in ballot, you’re gonna have to fight for it again. You shouldn’t take it for granted. And people realize that they’re taking their right to vote and the way that we’ve accommodated people’s right to vote a little bit for granted.

I think people are starting to stand up and speak out and tell their elected leaders, we care about these things, we want them and we need you to protect them instead of just sitting silent while these other folks are there undermining all of our election protections.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

I’m happy that it’s not all doom and gloom and that folks on the call and that our wonderful panelists are engaged in that work and broader networks to combat these horrible, horrible attacks on ERIC and other important election administration tools.

In closing, we have four minutes. We have one question in the chat that I want to make sure we get to and another one that I will answer in the Q&A chat. 

But this question if you could answer, Alex, is what is the rationale for not staying current with challenges or for not doing the work in a quiet time?

Alex Gulotta, Director, All Voting is Local Arizona

I’m assuming you mean why do they duck the challenges at the end? That would assume the challenges are being made in good faith, in my opinion. Part of what we haven’t really expressed really is I don’t think most of these tools are being pushed forward in good faith. I think these tools are actually trying to, in fact, kick people off the rolls.

They don’t like the fact that ERIC included a provision that helped get eligible but unregistered folks registered.They’re not folks that, in fact, support democracy and as Brad said, it’s the one-day, one-vote movement. 

At least one of our legislators in Arizona specifically called it the 1958-style voting movement. I know what that means to me and I don’t know what it means to you, but it doesn’t mean modern voting. It means voting before the Civil Rights Act. It means voting before the Voting Rights Act and that’s part of what’s motivating this and we need to call it out for what it is and not just talk about it objectively because there are people who simply just don’t want people who don’t look like them to vote and that’s part of what’s motivating this movement and we just have to recognize that that’s a piece of it and figure out how to fight against.

Andrew Garber, Democracy Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice

I echo everything Alex said and if I can just add on one quick point as it relates to the voter challenge aspect of this. Even when voter challenges are brought on complete, well-vetted, well-resourced information — and they often aren’t — but even when they are, the election officials have to be doing voter list maintenance already under federal law.

This is work they’re already doing. They are doing everything they can to stay current and often when we see these mass challenges or even smaller voter challenges, the end result is a lot of the people on those lists being challenged, have already been moved to inactive status, which is to say the state has already notified them [to say] we think you’re not eligible anymore unless you vote [or] unless you tell us differently. It’s going to take a few years because federal law requires that waiting period of two federal elections, we will remove you from the roles.

So at best these challenges are often redundant and they’re just forcing officials to, as Jonathan mentioned they have lots of things to do like set up polling places, now they have to stop and they respond to these challenges and they have to do their own research.

So that is being done currently. Having to respond to challenges immediately can be a big hurdle though.

Alissa Lopez, Strategic Partnerships Director, American Oversight

Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you to our amazing panelists for sharing your wonderful expertise and all the work that you all are doing and we are excited to have future conversations related to democracy and the fight that is ahead.