Earlier this year Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law Senate Bill 189, one of three major elections laws passed during this year’s legislative session. The law officially went into effect Monday, July 1st. Building on Senate Bill 202 which passed in 2021, the bill has four main components:
1. Restricting the use of QR codes for counting ballots.
2. Removing the Georgia Secretary of State (currently Brad Raffensperger) from the State Elections Board.
3. Expands ballot access for third party candidates by allowing any presidential candidate who has qualified for election in at least 20 other states automatically gain access in Georgia.
4. Allow members of the public to challenge a voter’s eligibility based on several criteria.
That fourth component drew the most debate and criticism from left-wing groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Fair Fight Action. They immediately claimed it’s a “voter suppression tool” that would lead to unnecessary voter challenges, burdening elections officials and unfairly targeting “black, brown, rural, unhoused, and disabled populations,” per a statement from Fair Fight Action.
On the flipside, supporters of the legislation– including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and state Sen. Max Burns, chairman of the influential Ethics Committee– defended the ability for the public to help both county and state level officials perform their required function of keeping voter rolls clean.
One of the tools used by individuals wishing to examine the state’s voter rolls is EagleAI, a software tool that compiles publicly available voter data from governmental and other secure data to allow individuals to see probable incorrect entries in the rolls. The software uses many of the same data sources as ERIC. That’s the tool used by the Secretary of State’s office when cleaning voter rolls itself, including voter list data from the Secretary of State’s office, corporate data from both the Secretary of State’s office as well as Google Business, felon records from the state, property and tax records from counties, permanent move data from the National Change of Address information and obituary records from the Social Security Death Index as well as from county coroners.
Recently a citizen and registered voter in Forsyth County submitted 749 registrations to the Forsyth Board of Elections (BOE) for review, only to have his challenges rejected by the board on the basis that the challenges had been generated by “third party software”– in this case EagleAI. SB 189 section 5 states “Probable causes shall include, but not be limited to,…. as confirmed or listed by or in a government office, data base, website, or publicly available sources derived solely from such governmental sources.” But by a 3-2 margin, the Forsyth BOE voted not to accept the challenges, which showed using Augusta-based EagleAI’s data that the voters had moved and registered to vote in a different state since last voting in Georgia. According to the board, the data produced by EagleAI was insufficient.
EagleAI CEO Rick Richards disagreed with the BOE’s decision.
“If they had asked, they would have known that the 749 registrations submitted included the Georgia voter registration date and number as well as the moved-to-state voter registration date and number, as well as the moved date. This data was compiled solely from SOS voter rolls and USPS NCOA data, i.e., federal and state source,” he told James Magazine Online.
“EagleAI is a software tool that allows people to volunteer to help counties with their federal and state mandated voter list maintenance. If there are literally thousands of registrations that are not eligible, then EagleAI will be a welcomed blessing helping save county employees thousands of hours of taxpayer funded work and county taxpayer.”
