A New Antidemocracy Tool - 2023-09-05
A New Antidemocracy Tool September 5, 2023,
Some of the nation's preeminent election deniers have launched EagleAI NETwork, a new project that could undermine voting rights and elections. Its key supporters include Georgia serial voter registration challenger Jason Frazier and former President Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell — best known for her participation in Trump's phone call asking Georgia's secretary of state to "find" him 11,780 votes. If EagleAI replaces existing election systems, it may be used to smear impartial election administration, disenfranchise voters, and set the stage for overturning unfavorable election results. It's another link in the antidemocracy chain that those unhappy with election outcomes are building.
Don't let the "AI" in the name fool you. There's nothing intelligent about EagleAI, which appears to be no more than a system that performs data matches based on a database of public voter data amassed by a web scraper. Its own proponents describe it as "Excel on steroids."
EagleAI takes from sources including the National Change of Address database, criminal justice records, and tax property data to create massive lists of voters. From there, it highlights names of potentially ineligible voters using criteria that are at best unreliable and at worst irrelevant, such as matching names on voter lists with change-of-address forms or felony convictions, or even just registration at nursing homes (baselessly implying that nursing home residents are somehow not competent to vote). Amateur investigators take the highlighted names and look for purported evidence of voter ineligibility, like a social media posting from out of state. They can then use EagleAI to auto-prepare challenge forms in a couple of clicks. It's no more than a clearinghouse for election deniers to compile mass challenges.