Exclusive: State Officials Meeting with Election-Denier Linked EagleAI Founder on NEW Voter Roll Purge Tools

Wednesday, we released newly obtained government records showing that state election officials have met with Dr. John “Rick” Richards, Jr. — the founder of the controversial voter roll purge tool EagleAI, which has drawn scrutiny from election officials and experts over its ties to election denial networks and reliance on error-prone data — to discuss newer tools known as ELLY and Psephos. Richards is a close ally of Cleta Mitchell, a longtime proponent of voting restrictions who aided President Trump in his attempt to remain in power in 2020.

With Richards slated to participate in today’s Georgia State Election Board meeting where, according to reporting, the systems are expected to be presented, the records raise questions about whether these platforms reflect a repackaging of the same flawed approach, relying on data sources that risk incorrectly flagging and disenfranchising eligible voters. 

First reported this morning by NBC News, the documents show that outreach around these tools has occurred across multiple states, including Missouri, Texas, and Rhode Island, as part of an apparent broader effort to introduce the software to election officials nationwide. In Missouri, records show that election officials met with Richards’ representatives, viewed a presentation, and engaged in follow-up communications regarding potential use of the tools. 

Meanwhile, records we previously obtained from North Carolina show election officials agreed to view a demonstration of ELLY after it was promoted by individuals affiliated with election denial activists and networks, including a group whose members have been trained to use third-party voter challenge software.

“When election officials devote taxpayer-funded time and resources to evaluating voter purge tools like ELLY or Psephos — products promoted by Rick Richards, who is closely aligned with well-known election deniers — alarm bells should sound. These platforms use unreliable datasets that are notorious for generating false flags, wrongly marking eligible Americans as suspicious and jeopardizing their right to vote,” said our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu. “Election integrity demands reliable tools to safeguard sensitive voter information, yet platforms like ELLY and Psephos fall short, relying on outdated data lags, high false positive rates from probabilistic matching, privacy and legal compliance risks, and unvalidated accuracy claims that threaten eligible voters’ rights. When officials legitimize these systems by meeting with their promoters or considering their adoption, they risk diverting valuable resources toward false leads, undermining confidence in election administration, and placing eligible voters under improper scrutiny.”

As NBC News notes, records and promotional materials further suggest a structured rollout strategy: ELLY is being marketed to county-level officials and led by Rick Richards Jr., while Psephos is geared toward state-level officials and associated with Richards III — demonstrating a calculated effort to promote the problematic and related tools across multiple levels of election administration.

The records also raise concerns about how these systems are designed to function — particularly given their ties to election denial networks — indicating that the platforms may rely on outside users, including curated or self-selected volunteers, to review and flag voter records for further scrutiny. In some cases, these users may be able to mark records as potential errors, raising the risk that actors aligned with efforts to challenge election outcomes could influence voter data or trigger investigations based on incomplete or misleading information.

Independent reporting and expert analyses have repeatedly warned that tools like ELLY, Psephos, and EagleAI rely on outdated or mismatched datasets, including public records that are not designed to determine voter eligibility — a limitation experts say can produce “huge numbers of false positives,” which increases the likelihood that eligible voters could be wrongly flagged and removed from the voter rolls altogether.

Today’s release of records is part of our ongoing efforts to bring greater transparency to the individuals and entities aiming to undermine confidence in American elections. In March 2024, we joined the Campaign Legal Center to send a letter to Georgia officials regarding a potential violation of state law in Columbia County’s agreement with EagleAI. Later that fall, we obtained recordings from Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network meetings — a national coalition that has played a central role in organizing election denial efforts and promoting election conspiracies and mass voter challenges — which demonstrated both the close ties between Richards and the network and the significant deficiencies of EagleAI.