#eagleai

Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone:

OF ALL THE STRANGE, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to rig foreign elections. Never mind that Chávez had been dead since 2013. Never mind that even Fox News’ researchers said the claims about Dominion Voting Systems were “100 percent false.” Fox ultimately paid Dominion $787 million after its hosts ignored the network’s research department and spread lies about the firm. But the consequences his allies have faced for pushing lies about the 2020 election have not diminished the former president’s appetite for conspiracy theories. If anything, they have only stoked it.

Since then, Trump has fixated on new bogeymen. Lately, he has found one in a mundane nonprofit designed to spot the very voter fraud Team Trump professes to hate. Until recently, 33 states and the District of Columbia — a mixture of solidly Republican, Democratic, and battleground states — used data from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to spot voting irregularities and to identify and reach voters who haven’t yet registered, a group that numbered 4.4 million people in 2022. ERIC has been employed in this way since 2012, without incident or controversy. But in Trump’s imagination, ERIC is the engine for election rigging. Last March, on his social media platform, Trump fumed that Republican governors should “immediately pull out of ERIC,” and falsely labeled it a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.” Over the past year, Trump has remained fixated on ERIC, sources who speak to him say. He’s gone so far as to wonder aloud what can be done in the future to make it “illegal” nationwide — while key allies have begun a largely under-the-radar effort to market a replacement system. One person close to him has dubbed ERIC Trump’s “new Dominion.”

Just like Dominion — or, should we say, just like the Dominion in Trumpland’s fever projections — ERIC is part of a larger architecture of voter fraud, one that has to be ripped out and replaced with a MAGA alternative before America goes to the polls in November. “Stop the Steal” die-hards are vying for spots in the 2024 campaign legal team. MAGA attorneys are challenging laws that make it easier to vote in Democratic strongholds. Trump’s allies continue to question the integrity of the vote, even if polls show him slightly ahead. Because there can be no question about the final tally, in the Trump inner circle’s view. There is only an election that ensures the right result: Trump’s restoration to the White House. You’ve probably never even heard of ERIC — until now, you’d have no reason to. So here’s a brief primer: ERIC was created in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts. It started with seven original member states with a goal of helping modernize their outdated, often paper-record-based voter-registration data — and offers trustworthy information to clean up voter rolls of deceased or ineligible voters. States are then able to securely share specific information about voters, like the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, to eliminate any confusion about who a voter is and whether they’re eligible to register. John Merrill, Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, was a fan. Having access to a pool of specific information about who’s eligible to vote — and who’s not — seemed like a gift. But when he traveled a couple of years ago to Washington, D.C., where renowned conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell was hosting a private, four-hour meeting for secretaries of state, he found himself in a lonely minority of ERIC supporters.

At that meeting, Mitchell made herself clear: She wanted these secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC. It was being used unfairly “to promote more Democrat registrations,” Mitchell complained, according to Merrill’s recollection. What’s more, ERIC was actually created and funded by George Soros, the billionaire liberal donor and ultimate bête noire among GOP politicians and right-wing media. “Basically, what they wanted to talk about was why we needed to get rid of ERIC,” Merrill tells Rolling Stone. This was, to Merrill’s ears, odd. He knew Mitchell was a Trump ally; she served as a Trump 2020 campaign attorney and sat in on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which the former president demanded that the Georgia secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s election. Merrill was a Trump man himself. But this Soros stuff was bizarre. Merrill adds, “Not from Cleta Mitchell or anyone have I ever seen any empirical data that would support the position that George Soros is involved in or related to or had any influence at all in the creation or in the administration of the ERIC system.”

[...] THE SPRAWLING CONSERVATIVE QUEST against ERIC appears to have begun in earnest in the swamps of conspiracy-theory media. In January 2022, the pro-Trump blog Gateway Pundit published a three-part series accusing ERIC of being a secret plot by Soros to create a “left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter-roll clean up.” It’s a far cry from the boring but necessary work ERIC actually does. In addition to checking for outdated voter information, it produces reports on citizens who are eligible to vote but unregistered. Once every two years, ERIC requires its participating states to conduct outreach to those eligible but unregistered potential voters and offer them information on how they can register to vote — often via postcards. Some Republican officials, including Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who withdrew his state last year, have objected to that requirement, writing that “members should not be forced” to conduct such outreach if they don’t believe it’s “necessary or relevant.” But it’s hardly the stuff of florid conspiracy theories spun by the Gateway Pundit. When the site ran its series on ERIC, 33 states were members of the nonprofit. But after, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced he would suspend the state’s participation in ERIC following concerns from the public about “potential questionable funding sources” and “possibly partisan actors” accessing ERIC data. As the right-wing conspiracy meme gained steam, eight other Republican-led states, including critical 2024 ones such as Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, followed suit, leading ERIC membership to plummet to 24 states and the District of Columbia today.

[...] The argument is more than theoretical. In 2005, Kansas developed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. Much like ERIC, the network pledged to help states improve the accuracy of the data underlying their voter rolls by allowing member states to share registration information. But Crosscheck relied heavily on using registrants’ names and birthdays to check for potentially duplicate registrations, leading to high rates of false positives. In one academic study of Crosscheck data, researchers found that the program wrongly flagged 99 percent of registrations. In 2019, Kansas agreed to settle a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and shut down Crosscheck following a data breach that exposed personal information of voters shared by the program. With the demise of Crosscheck, and as larger, conservative-led states have walked away from ERIC, pro-Trump activists like Mitchell have promoted a new tool, dubbed the EagleAI Network, for states that have left the nonprofit. EagleAI was developed in 2022 by John W. Richards, a medical doctor and health care CEO from Alabama. Mitchell has a number of ties to EagleAI, as the investigative watchdog Documented first detailed, including helping the group with strategic planning, legal advice, and hosting demonstrations of the software for her Election Integrity Network nonprofit. EagleAI’s developers hinted at their ambition for the software in an August article for Just the News, a pro-Trump outlet. In the article and company documents published with the piece, the company said it wanted the software to be “the solution across the nation for use at all levels of Voter Roll validation, maintenance, and review.” In an email to Rolling Stone, Richards said that “while EagleAI could replace ERIC, doing so is not its mission.”

Rolling Stone reports on how Trump allies are urging red states to exit of Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) in favor of EagleAI. ERIC had bipartisan support, while EagleAI will only have support from MAGA election deniers.

The right-wing war on ERIC was launched by far-right election denialist outlet The Gateway Pundit.