Inside Election Integrity Network Meetings

At the forefront of today’s anti-democracy movement as it seeks to cast doubt on election security is Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, an influential election denial activist group focused on conspiracy theories about voter fraud — including baseless claims that voter registration lists are rife with errors and fraud.

As activists look to find ways to “clean” the voter rolls, they have frequently pushed the use of fringe technology like EagleAI NETwork. Over the last year, EagleAI has emerged as a profoundly flawed alternative to the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which states use to securely maintain up-to-date voter rolls. Voter fraud vigilantes determined to uncover supposed fraudulent registrations have used EagleAI — which has long been promoted by Cleta Mitchell — to launch mass voter challenges. 

American Oversight recently obtained recordings of Election Integrity Network (EIN) meetings, featured in reporting by the Baltimore Banner, that not only demonstrate the close ties between EagleAI founder Dr. John “Rick” Richards and the Election Integrity Network, but also the severe deficiencies of EagleAI.

Most notably, in a meeting of EIN’s voter rolls working group on March 20, 2024, a recording of which had been shared with the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office, Richards said that the EagleAI algorithms only “pick up 90% of [voter] moves,” with people having to manually review the rest of the data. 

Caption: March 20, 2024 meeting of the Election Integrity Network voter rolls working group.

According to Richards, as of that day EagleAI had loaded into its program information known as “moved voter data” — data about voters who had moved to new jurisdictions and therefore had potentially outdated registrations — from only nine states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas), with five additional states forthcoming (Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Maryland, and Wisconsin). Richards went on to ask EIN members for additional state voter rolls — the standard compilation of voter registration data — to load into EagleAI, demonstrating a reliance on volunteers to obtain voter rolls at varying times and frequencies. In contrast to ERIC, which regularly provides member states with a wide variety of confidential data reports, Richards’ request highlights the software’s limitations.  

Despite the small number of states captured in EagleAI’s moved voter data, the company had months earlier drafted a contract with Georgia’s Columbia County. The fact that only two of EagleAI’s nine states for which it had moved voter data were states that neighbor Georgia further underscores the inadequacy of EagleAI as a replacement for ERIC. (Georgia is still a member of ERIC, despite the far-right misinformation campaign that led several states to withdraw from the partnership in recent years.) 

During a May 1 voter rolls working group meeting, which had been provided to the Maryland State Board of Elections, EIN members further conceded EagleAI’s unreliability. Greg Buck, who along with right-wing election denier lawyer Erick Kaardal had filed complaints about Minnesota’s ERIC membership, said that EagleAI was “in a development phase, and so they have issues, and they are working diligently on those things. But sometimes there are setbacks.” Stefan Bartelski, an EIN member who unsuccessfully challenged more than 742 voter registrations in Georgia, said that all new EagleAI users must be vouched for by existing users and that there had “been a lot of issues with people trying to break in […] by hacking the hardware.” This was not the first time EagleAI suffered from hacking disruptions — records previously obtained by American Oversight indicated that on Oct. 4, 2023, several EagleAI servers became inoperative after an “attack on the Windows server software.” 

Caption: May 1, 2024 meeting of the Election Integrity Network voter rolls working group. 

During that same meeting, EIN members also discussed the lack of success they’d had in their baseless quest to find mass voter fraud. Doug Ardt of Arizona acknowledged that canvassing revealed no evidence of widespread voter roll inaccuracies: “We only knock on doors if we just can’t determine from investigating the voter registration as to whether or not it’s valid. And that’s very rarely. Occasionally, we do, and usually, it turns out that well, it looks a little iffy, but the registration is just fine.” This admission is yet another piece of evidence undermining EIN’s claims of mass voter fraud — and that the widespread voter impersonation EagleAI was purportedly designed to find has simply not occurred.

In addition to baseless registration challenges, EIN members have also been concerned with anti-immigrant conspiracy theories about illegal voting. During the March 20 meeting, Allison Nickolai, a member of the Ohio EIN, said that she had worked on the “Cleta survey,” a likely reference to Cleta Mitchell, and that she had looked for non-citizens on Ohio voter rolls, claiming that there were potentially 190,000 such registrations. Nickolai also claimed non-citizens were added to the rolls through applications for public benefits like SNAP, implying that these programs should be more closely monitored to prevent voter fraud. 

Willard Helander, a former clerk for Lake County, Ill., also spoke on the call, sharing conspiracy theories about illegal voting by immigrants: “Literally, under the executive order from the president, [Border Patrol agents] are required when [migrants] come out of the water, if they literally cross versus plane in, to offer a towel and pretty much a voter registration form.” The EIN has long advanced xenophobic myths about non-citizen voting that are based on racist “great replacement” fears, targeting immigrant communities in their efforts to undermine elections. 

The recorded meetings of the Election Integrity Network provide another illustration of the election denial movement’s current fixations, from deploying flawed programs like EagleAI to allege voter fraud to using the false specter of non-citizen voting to purge voters from the rolls. Those are just two of the tactics discussed in American Oversight’s 2024 Anti-Democracy Playbook, which outlines how the anti-democracy movement is laying the groundwork for post-election confusion that can be used to challenge the results.