In June, a nascent right-wing group in Nevada sent more than a thousand names to 10 county clerks and registrars in an attempt to get them purged from the state’s voter registration. There’s similar efforts underway in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia and dozens of other states.
Since the 2020 election, when former President Donald Trump and his network of conservative sycophants pushed dangerous and false allegations of voter fraud and other election conspiracy theories, his most loyal supporters are now trying to challenge millions of registered voters before the November election. The effort has evolved into a cottage industry of self-styled election integrity groups recruiting small armies of volunteers to try and identify registered voters that they believe should be removed from state and local voter rolls.
It’s hard to fully grasp the scale of this effort. The ecosystem is composed of smaller hyperlocal grassroots groups like the Pigpen Project in Nevada and North of 29 in Wisconsin along with bigger groups — like the Cleta Mitchell-backed Election Integrity Network (EIN), True the Vote and United Sovereign Americans — that are coordinating multi state efforts to challenge voters. At the heart of the issue is how these groups are obtaining voter registration data to initiate these mass challenges. True the Vote and EIN have even developed their own software — IV3 and EagleAI, respectively — that use incomplete or flawed voter registration data, resulting in dozens of mass voter challenges of lawfully registered voters’ registration status.
But the recent rise of mass voter challenges is creating a massive strain for county clerks, registrars, secretaries of state and other election officials who are tasked with maintaining clean voter rolls. “There is legal procedure in place to challenge the residency and eligibility of a voter. These third-party efforts to remove voters do not follow those procedures, and it’s important for voters to know that we follow the law,” Bethany Drysdale, a spokesperson for Washoe County, Nevada office of the county manager, recently told Democracy Docket in an emailed statement. “It is a voter’s responsibility to update their registration by notifying our office, and without their consent there are extensive steps defined by statute that must be taken before we can make any changes that would affect their ability to vote.”
Despite the barrage of right-wing misinformation, disinformation and legal challenges in the past four years that, cumulatively, push a false narrative that most states’ voter rolls are inaccurate, the truth is the opposite: states generally maintain very accurate voter rolls and the regular processes in place to shed inactive or ineligible voters are working just as they should.
“Election officials already have processes in place to make sure their voter roll lists are accurate,” Lizzie Ulmer, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Communications at the States United Democracy Center, said to Democracy Docket in an email.
“These anti-democracy groups are abusing the system and wasting time and resources of local officials — all based on unreliable data and election lies. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bad actors try to undermine our elections. These mass challenges are part of the anti-democracy playbook.”
Democracy Docket identified eight groups leading the right-wing effort to challenge the registrations of millions of voters across the country. It’s important to note that the activities of these groups don’t account for the entirety of the mass voter challenge effort — each state has their own statutes that outline who, exactly, can challenge voter registrations. And some states, like Georgia, have made it easier for regular citizens to challenge voter registrations on a mass scale.
Election Integrity Network (EIN)
Founded in 2021 by former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, EIN is one of the largest groups leading the voter challenge efforts. EIN initially started as a large-scale, well-funded effort to recruit thousands of election workers and poll watchers in the 2022 midterm election. It’s since expanded these efforts to foster a coalition of different state groups to engage in advocating various anti-democracy measures at the local level.
Last year, EIN-affiliated activists launched EagleAI — an incomplete and flawed database of voter roll records — and local EIN groups have been using the software to bring about voter registration challenges in various swing states.
States active: Arizona, Florida Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas
True the Vote
Though the Texas-based True the Vote’s anti-voting efforts date way back to 2011, the group is behind the IV3 software that features inaccurate voter registration data being used to challenge voter rolls across the country. Ahead of the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia, the group was behind a mass effort to cancel 360,000 voter registrations. Recently, True the Vote is flooding Texas election officials with voter registration challenges. True the Vote, through its IV3 software, is assisting with voter challenge efforts in at least California, New York and Washington, according to Documented.
States active: California, Georgia, New York, Texas, Washington
The People’s Audit
The People’s Audit was originally founded in 2020 in Florida to analyze the state’s voter rolls, according to Documented, but it’s since expanded its efforts. The group says they’re engaged in efforts in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas to analyze and challenge voter roll registrations. In May, failed Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Gunter announced a partnership with The People’s Audit to “[clean] up the voter rolls” in the state.
States active: Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas
United Sovereign Americans (USA)
USA was formed in 2024 by Marly Hornik, a right-wing activist that also started the NY Citizens Audit in 2022, a self-described “non-partisan group of citizens dedicated to restoring and maintaining the essential, founding American principle of sovereignty through honest, provable elections in New York and across the nation.”
USA has been both recruiting and training volunteers across the country to look up and challenge voter roll registrations in their community, but their main effort has been filing a pair of lawsuits targeting voter roll maintenance and accuracy in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
States active: Maryland, Pennsylvania
Pigpen Project
Formed in 2023 by conservative activist Chuck Muth to “clean up” Nevada’s voter registration rolls, the Pigpen Project has been recruiting volunteers to identify and submit names to county election officials to be removed from voter rolls. According to the New York Times, the group is working with EIN, True the Vote and Vote Ref — another unreliable database of semi-public voter information — to identify voters. By Muth’s own admission, the group is also engaging in “boots on the ground” to canvass door-to-door in the Silver State to confirm voter registrations.
States active: Nevada
North of 29
Another group recruiting volunteers for a door-to-door canvassing effort is the Wisconsin-based North of 29. The group, formed in 2020 by Stephanie Forrer-Harbridge according to The Guardian, is canvassing at least 72 counties in Wisconsin, with the help of noted election denier Mike Lindell.
States active: Wisconsin
Soles to the Roll
Soles to the Roll is the name of the effort by Michigan Fair Elections, the state’s EIN affiliate, to challenge voter registrations throughout the state. The group is recruiting and training volunteers to use another notoriously unreliable database — Check My Vote — to identify potential voters to report to election officials.
States active: Michigan
Iowa Canvassing
In 2022 and 2023, Iowa Canvassing challenged nearly one thousand voter registrations in Linn and Black Hawk counties, resulting in more than 500 registration cancellations. The group formed sometime after the 2020 election, according to local reporting, as a “grassroots group of volunteers keeping Iowa voter rolls clean for fair and trusted elections” and uses a mix of data research, door-to-door canvassing, and volunteering at the polls to identify voter registrations to challenge.
States active: Iowa
Legal Constraints on Removing Voters From the Rolls
Even though the United States’ population is highly mobile, there is no national voter registration list. Instead, states and often localities maintain separate lists. Their election officials need to update these lists frequently as voters move, so they can communicate with voters and direct them to the right voting location. To ensure they do so, Congress enacted the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires that states take reasonable measures to facilitate voter registration and remove the names of voters who have died, or moved to a new jurisdiction, or have otherwise become ineligible.
In addition, over a decade ago, a bipartisan group of state election officials conceived an interstate agreement to responsibly share their data for these purposes: the Electronic Registration Information Center. Known as ERIC, this has vastly improved member states’ voting rolls and made for smoother elections. But in the aftermath of the 2020 election, ERIC has come under threat, as election deniers seek to shift control to vigilantes using unreliable tools for updating state rolls. Below, we explain how ERIC came about, why it’s now at risk, and some key protections that can shield voters from the consequences of changing voter list maintenance practices.
The Pre-2020 Consensus
Until 2012, states lacked reliable ways to flag voters who had moved, especially those who moved out of state. While there’s no evidence that list inaccuracies were leading to any widespread voter fraud, four states developed a program, commonly known as Crosscheck, to share voter rolls and check them for duplicates. Crosscheck, which expanded to include other states, was an example of a “solution” worse than the problem. It often flagged false positive matches because it relied on a combination of name matches, which inaccurately picked out common names, and date of birth matches, which were frequently missing or inaccurately entered into state systems.1Matching tools like Crosscheck that rely too heavily on name searches also disproportionately flag minority voters because of how widespread certain first and last names are in those communities. For these and other reasons, Crosscheck was notoriously unreliable. Election officials had to weed out large volumes of names inaccurately marked for de-registration, and they sometimes failed, and purged eligible voters from their rolls. Finally, Crosscheck failed to protect citizens’ data privacy.
Over a decade ago, election officials conceived a better approach. In 2012, seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, and Washington — four of which were Republican-led, launched ERIC. Over time, it grew to include over 30 state members. ERIC collects data from four sources: encrypted state voter registration and Department of Motor Vehicle data, death data from the U.S. Social Security Administration, and change of address data from the U.S. Postal Service. It then applies sophisticated matching technology to provide member states with reports highlighting potentially inaccurate voter roll information. It sends states lists of likely eligible citizens who are not yet registered. It also offers states reports of voters who may have double-voted in another member state, though this is extremely rare.
Because of ERIC’s unique matching technology and access to sensitive and current state-level data, such as hashed and encrypted social security numbers, ERIC is the best tool yet for matching accurately with minimal false positives. It’s also scrupulously bipartisan, rotating the chair position between Republican-led and Democrat-led states.
To date, ERIC has helped states identify millions of registrants who should be taken off the rolls because they moved or died. It has made voting rolls more accurate, which helps states steer voters to the right precincts to minimize confusion and ensure access on Election Day. It has enabled states to catch rare instances of double-voting. And because its membership agreement requires states to reach out to the eligible but unregistered citizens it identifies, it has facilitated millions of new registrations, fostering a more engaged citizenry and a more representative government.
ERIC would seem to be a no-brainer for election administrators. Indeed, until recently, it was widely praised by Republicans and Democrats alike as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” and as a “godsend” that would “lead[] to cleaner and more accurate voter registration rolls” and “increase voter participation in our elections.”
Attacks on ERIC Since the 2020 Election
After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, his supporters raised questions about numerous aspects of election administration, including voter list maintenance, to sow doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections.
As part of this campaign, election deniers went after ERIC. Starting in January 2022, a far-right outlet, Gateway Pundit, posted a series of pieces falsely accusing ERIC of being a front for liberal interests and implying that it was doing something other than identifying potential inaccuracies in state voter rolls. They spurred a campaign among both activists and Republican party leaders like Donald Trump pressuring state officials to withdraw from ERIC. And nine Republican-led states did leave, including states whose leaders had recently touted their membership in ERIC as a best practice.
Without membership in ERIC, states may lack reliable methods of updating their rolls when registrants move, making it harder for them to communicate with voters and direct them to the right polling location. In turn, this increases the risk of voters being prevented from voting or forced to vote by provisional ballots, which themselves can delay vote counting. States that refuse to be part of ERIC also give up the best tool for ensuring that voter rolls contain only eligible voters. As Al Smith, Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of the commonwealth, put it, “The perversity with a lot of this is that the arguments against ERIC are allegedly coming from a place of interest in election integrity, when in reality, ERIC is quite possibly the most valuable, useful tool that we have to strengthen election integrity.”
While states can purchase data from the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address Registry, those data cannot replace ERIC. Residents may fill out a change-of-address form whenever they need to receive mail elsewhere, which is frequently for temporary reasons that do not affect their voting eligibility: for example, they’re studying elsewhere, have a temporary work assignment, or are caring for a sick family member. In addition, individuals may be inaccurately flagged because they share a name with someone else who moved or because a member of their household moved and accidentally checked the “family” box rather than the “individual” box. ERIC accounts for these issues by cross-referencing change-of-address reports to its in-state and cross-state movers’ reports.
Recognizing that change-of-address data isn’t sufficient to update voter rolls, states that have left ERIC have been exploring other interstate data-sharing agreements. It remains to be seen whether these will share the kind of sensitive data that enables ERIC to make precise matches, how many sources they’ll be able to access, how good their matching technology will be, and whether they’ll include adequate privacy protections for whatever sensitive data they do collect. Regardless, these efforts will be far less effective and cost-effective than ERIC, which enables 24 states plus the District of Columbia to share their data — particularly Department of Motor Vehicle data —and to share the cost of purchasing federal data.
Even more concerning, some private organizations have begun developing matching software to “replace” ERIC and are working to place it in the hands of both election officials and private activists, even in states that continue to participate in ERIC. Among various programs being floated, one appears to have generated particular enthusiasm: EagleAI. EagleAI pulls data from various sources — such as the National Change of Address Registry, “Google scrapes,” business records, and property tax records — and identifies potential inconsistencies that may or may not constitute evidence that a registered voter has moved or is otherwise ineligible to vote where registered. Because most states allow private citizens to challenge voter registrations before and during an election and essentially force election officials to review those challenged registrations, EagleAI’s strategy appears to be twofold: train volunteers to use this software to file large volumes of challenges, and pitch the same software to election officials as a tool for adjudicating those and other challenges. In the recent past, mass challenges have not always been responsibly handled and have sometimes resulted in improper, large-scale voter purges.
Though EagleAI’s proponents pitch it as nonpartisan, internal planning documents indicate it’s funded by Donors Trust, a dark money conservative group that also funds election denial efforts.footnote6_n4Ax2sWigIvO9 It’s being rolled out specifically to activists associated with right-wing election denial groups such as the Election Integrity Network that are trying to organize mass voter challenges to state voter rolls.
As described to potential users in these rollouts, the software is designed to autofill various fields in a state’s challenge form, making it easy for users to quickly complete a large volume of these forms. Also as described, once a registration has been flagged for challenging, EagleAI then stores the form with others to be submitted to election offices en masse on the last day for filing challenges — maximizing the chaos by minimizing the time officials have to decide whether to take the serious step of removing voters from the rolls. Because some state laws require that challengers live in the same jurisdiction as the registrants they challenge, EagleAI’s promoters are enlisting local voters to submit challenges compiled by other activists. This approach could conflict with certain state laws, and it certainly conflicts with the original rationale for private challenges — that they serve as a way for people to contribute knowledge about their local community. All this looks suspiciously like a recipe for overwhelming election offices and increasing the risk that some eligible voters will be incorrectly removed from the rolls.
Indeed, EagleAI’s supporters are pitching the software to local election officials as a way to update their rolls, prescreen voter registration forms, and respond to “15,000 challenges on a spreadsheet” that they “don’t know what to do with.” In a private training session, EagleAI’s founder openly celebrated that election officials “can’t respond” to mass challenges on short notice, and therefore may be looking to “outsource their headache” to EagleAI.
EagleAI has reached out to numerous state and local officials and has acquired at least one government contract. In Georgia, the Columbia County Board of Canvassers used taxpayer money to purchase EagleAI licenses, even though state election officials advised the board that EagleAI would not improve the accuracy of county voting rolls, which are already updated using ERIC’s reports. While the board has said it’s only using EagleAI to flag registrations for review, reports and internal documents indicate that EagleAI is promoting itself to the board as a tool to vet voting registration applications, flag registered voters for removal, and even resolve challenges.
EagleAI appears to use the Voter Reference Foundation’s (VoteRef) publicly available voter list as one of its data sources. VoteRef, itself substantially funded by a single right-wing, election-denying donor, provides only a snapshot of dynamic voter registration lists that quickly becomes outdated and often lacks critical data like date of birth, which raises the risk of false matches based on name similarities. Internal EagleAI planning documents and public statements by its founder raise concerns that activists might target certain vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, homeless individuals, and individuals from immigrant communities. And EagleAI’s backers have made misleading statements about current voter rolls. For example, they claim that Georgia has more registered voters than residents based on a list of registered voters that included names already flagged for possible removal by the state. They also conflate routine list inaccuracies like typos with actually ineligible voters.
As summed up by Georgia Elections Director Blake Evans, “Instead of asking questions or being curious about the data, EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then spreads them as if they are facts.”
Beyond these specific concerns, it’s troubling that some local election officials are turning to a little-known software tool promoted by election denial activists rather than well-studied and externally audited software maintained by a bipartisan organization led by state election officials with a transparent membership agreement and bylaws. While ERIC posts comprehensive information about its membership and internal processes and safeguards, EagleAI does not. And it’s alarming that election-denial activists seem poised to organize mass challenges to registered voters and intentionally bring these challenges at the last minute, when election staff may have limited bandwidth to vet them adequately.
In short, both public and private initiatives to replace ERIC pose a high risk of disenfranchising voters and sowing misinformation about voter roll accuracy.
Legal Constraints on Removing Voters From the Rolls
Fortunately, the National Voter Registration Act provides some protection to voters by limiting when and how they can be removed from the rolls.
Under the act, states and their subdivisions can only remove voters in one of five circumstances. First, if the voter affirms the change. Second, if required by state law due to a criminal conviction or mental incapacity. Third, for the death of the voter. Fourth, if the voter confirms a change of residence in writing. Fifth, based on other evidence of a change of residence, but only after the state sends a notice and the voter both fails to respond and fails to vote in the next two federal general elections. There is no exception for removing a voter for a change of residence because the county has used private data or because the voter was challenged.
The act also prohibits the systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election and requires that any removal processes be uniform, nondiscriminatory, and compliant with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If officials removed voters from the rolls based solely on database matching, that would clearly be systematic, and therefore prohibited within that 90-day window. In some circumstances, removals that are concentrated in certain precincts or populations could violate the National Voter Registration Act’s uniformity and nondiscrimination requirements or the Voting Rights Act.
Additionally, state officials are limited by the Constitution. Before being removed from the rolls, voters must have notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. They cannot be targeted for removal on discriminatory grounds. State constitutions generally include parallel, or in some cases even stronger, due process and equal protection rights. Some state laws also constrain removals based on private challenges, such as by requiring that challenges be based on personal knowledge and/or specific evidence, by outlining a process for notifying challenged voters and considering their response, and/or by penalizing frivolous challenges or knowingly false allegations.
Pro-voter groups will need to keep a close eye on voter rolls to make sure that election officials comply with these laws.
• • •
One of the distressing legacies of the 2020 election is the politicization of bipartisan election administrative tools like ERIC. As some states cave to election deniers and withdraw from ERIC, these same activists are trying to fill the void they’ve helped to create with flawed tools that could disenfranchise voters and sow misinformation. Fortunately, there are legal protections that can be brought to bear against irresponsible efforts to remove voters from state voter rolls.
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