Prominent Election Deniers’ Ties to ERIC Alternatives and Threats to Voting Rights in 2024

As several states this year caved to a far-right, baseless pressure campaign to leave the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), they created an opening for conservative activists and powerful allies of former President Trump to further their anti-democratic efforts — including by pitching their own severely flawed alternatives. And those alternatives present alarming implications for voting rights ahead of the 2024 election.

Documents obtained through public records requests and litigation, outlined in American Oversight’s new report “The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC” reveal how outside groups and private companies supported by prominent election deniers have been pushing new products to replicate ERIC’s function of maintaining up-to-date voter rolls. But as experts warn, those purported replacements will make it easier for voter-fraud vigilantes to challenge and threaten the voting rights of thousands. 

ERIC is one of the leading tools election officials have to ensure that they are working from accurate lists of voters. Over the last two years, however, nine states have left the partnership thanks to a campaign fueled by conspiracy theories and false claims about election fraud. The space left behind has provided fertile ground for activists and private interests — including many of the same people involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election — who see an opportunity to continue to undermine trust in U.S. democracy. 

Cleta Mitchell and Her Network 

Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell is a longtime proponent of voting restrictions who, having aided President Trump in his attempt to remain in power in 2020, now runs a coalition of election denial groups called the Election Integrity Network. In meetings with top election officials, Mitchell and associates in her network were instrumental in the anti-ERIC campaign that drove states to quit the system, and in recent months have pushed to be more closely involved in voter roll maintenance. 

American Oversight obtained a May 2023 email from Mitchell to West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner’s general counsel and chief of staff: “You made reference last week to some databases that your office and clerks used in your efforts to clean voter rolls,” Mitchell wrote. “Do you mind sending me those databases and any information about them, so I can forward them to the National Working Group on Voter Rolls?”  

A week earlier, Secretary Warner had spoken at a convening of the Voter Rolls National Working Group, hosted by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP), about steps West Virginia was taking to maintain list accuracy. Reporting in May 2023 indicated Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network was being partially folded into VIPP, which is a member of the State Policy Network, an alliance of more than 100 think tanks that regularly advocate for extreme right-wing policies. 

That same week, Warner and his general counsel Donald Kersey had presented at a webinar about post-ERIC plans to clean voter rolls. The discussion was hosted by the Election Integrity Network and Virginia Fair Elections, a coalition that includes “election integrity” groups. A June 2023 email also illustrates the extent to which, with ERIC out of the picture, Warner’s office was working with VIPP and Mitchell’s network: In the email, the Election Integrity Network’s Julia Hecht mentioned that Kersey had requested a handout that had been shared with VIPP’s voter rolls working group by Rick Richards, a retired Georgia medical doctor who in summer 2022 founded a company known as EagleAI NETwork. 

EagleAI

EagleAI is a database used by right-wing activists on the hunt for voter fraud. Reporting by Documented found that Valid Vote, EagleAI’s associated nonprofit, was formed around the same time by Compass Legal Group, a firm associated with Mitchell. EagleAI materials assert that the software will become “the tool of reckoning across the nation,” and an EagleAI planning document refers to the software as “[E]xcel on steroids.”

Election experts have uniformly been unimpressed by EagleAI. Georgia Elections Director Blake Evans, “EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then presents them as if they are evidence of wrongdoing,” adding that the program “offers zero additional value to Georgia’s existing list maintenance procedures.” Despite these vulnerabilities, EagleAI and its proponents, including Mitchell, have argued for state and local election officials to use the company’s voter roll management software as an “alternative” to ERIC, with Valid Vote reportedly setting a goal of raising $2.1 million in advance of the 2024 elections.

Despite warnings from voting-rights experts and the state elections board that the software “draws inaccurate conclusions” and could not be trusted to provide reliable information, Georgia’s Columbia County agreed earlier this month to use EagleAI. We obtained records that include an email from the county elections director to EagleAI founder Richards just two months earlier asking about an alleged “hack” that had been mentioned at a county election board meeting. 

Richards acknowledged in his email that EagleAI servers became inoperative in October “possibly due to an attack on the Windows server software.” Richards said that the company took security “very seriously” and noted that EagleAI “contains only public available data” — a shortcoming shared by the inter-state agreements seeking to replicate ERIC, whose secure use of information from non-public DMV databases makes it reliable and effective. (See also our discussion of how states’ attempts to replace ERIC have fallen short.)

VoteRef.com

EagleAI is not the only tool that voter-fraud activists could use to crowdsource data for the purposes of issuing voter challenges. Reporting suggests EagleAI interacts with VoteRef.com, an online project designed to be a resource for people who want to inspect voter rolls that is run by Gina Swoboda, the executive director of the Voter Reference Foundation and a former organizer of Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign in Arizona. 

Voting-rights and privacy advocates have voiced concerns that, like EagleAI, VoteRef could be used not just to compromise individual privacy, but also to intimidate voters, cause mass cancellations of voting registrations, and inundate local election offices with burdensome, time-consuming, and inaccurate challenges. 

Mitchell also appears to have been involved in facilitating connections between VoteRef and election officials: Records we obtained show that Mitchell introduced Swoboda to Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray in January 2023 and corresponded over text about voter identification records and Gray’s statements in support of auditing ballot counts by hand. Emails indicate Swoboda had contacted Gray and his office multiple times throughout the year.

Information gleaned from VoteRef has fueled numerous voter challenges and fraud allegations. In February, Ian Camacho — the research director of a group that supported defendants facing charges for participating in the January 6 insurrection — contacted a Texas Senate staffer asking about the status of dozens of challenges submitted by an “anonymous tipster” known as Totes Legit Votes. 

Records of similar complaints lodged by Camacho and Totes Legit Votes with the Missouri secretary of state’s office in March suggest that they had used the VoteRef database. Camacho also cited VoteRef data in an email to election officials in Wake County, N.C., alleging instances of double voting. 

Omega4America

Another voter data monitoring software being pushed by fraud activists is Omega4America. For instance, documents show that in Arizona, state Sens. Wendy Rogers, a vocal election denier, and John Kavanagh both separately emailed Swoboda to ask for her thoughts about the technology. 

According to the Texas Tribune, the software was initially funded by MyPillow CEO and prominent election denier Mike Lindell. The program’s creator, Jay Valentine, was active in post-2020 election denial efforts, as revealed in other documents we uncovered, including by pushing his “fractal programming technology” as a way to identify supposed voter-roll issues and authoring a report used by government officials and activists seeking to cast doubt on Wisconsin’s 2020 election results. 

Valentine also appears to be trying to step into the empty space ERIC once filled. In March 2023, Valentine sent a letter to Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored the legislation pulling Texas out of ERIC, offering to demonstrate how Omega4America’s Fractal technology could be used “to study Texas voter rolls and clean them of phantom voters and fake addresses.” Valentine also pitched the system to Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson in May as “the most comprehensive, scalable voter roll management, reporting and monitoring system in production today.” Other documents obtained by American Oversight and reported on by NPR reveal that in August, Nelson shared with top staff an “[i]nteresting article” written by Valentine about his Fractal technology.

Notably, none of the replacement programs — or the interstate agreements that have been devised across the country — contain provisions aimed at increasing voter participation. Despite the demonstrated effectiveness of ERIC as well as the unproven claims, uncertain costs, and alarming opportunities for voter intimidation inherent in programs like EagleAI and VoteRef, election deniers are fiercely advocating for ERIC replacements that would advance their own anti-democratic agenda, and perhaps line their pockets.