In the News
ICYMI: Florida is using a fraud-hunting tool used by the right to look for voters to remove from the rolls
Earlier this week, NBC News reported that conservative activists sent a list of 10,000 Florida voters to state election officials, who directed Supervisors of Elections to use new laws for “list maintenance” to target voters for removal. The email came from “activists” with links to far-right groups behind EagleAI, a program built by Republicans to challenge voter registrations.
“Florida voters should be on high alert — Republicans are taking notes from a conservative AI program to wipe out voters from the rolls,” FDP Chair Nikki Fried. “This is even more proof that new election laws are being weaponized to remove voters from the rolls, masquerading as ‘list maintenance,’ to inflate their voter registration lead. Florida Democrats are actively working to educate voters about these new voter suppression tactics.”
Changes in laws surrounding list maintenance have led to more than 1 million voters being marked inactive in the last year. These purged voters are disproportionately Democrats, and even include a Democratic nominee for Congress. Concerned Floridians can visit flade.ms/checkstatus to confirm their status as an active voter.
Key excerpts from the article are below:
NBC News: Florida is using a fraud-hunting tool used by the right to look for voters to remove from the rolls
– “Florida wants local elections officials to use data collected by far-right activists, some of whom falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen, to potentially remove people from the state’s voter rolls, according to emails obtained by NBC News.”
– “The network of activists has been collecting voter data in 24 states, and on May 3, one of them emailed the Florida-specific information to a top state election official. It included the names of roughly 10,000 voters from across the state the group insists should be examined for potential removal from the voter rolls, a process commonly referred to as list maintenance.”
– “The “concerned citizen” who sent the May 3 email was Dan Heim, a longtime Florida-based activist who has made unfounded voter fraud claims across the state. He told Matthews in the email that he worked with a group that helped create a program called EagleAI (pronounced “Eagle Eye”), a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promise to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other sources.”
– “The left will hate this,” Mitchell said during an EagleAI demonstration to the Election Integrity Network last year. “They will hate it. But we love it.”
– “The list was provided with no information about the source of data or methodology used to identify these voters,” read the letter, which was signed by a collection of voting rights groups. “It is a criminal offense in Florida to make frivolous challenges, which are subject to misdemeanor penalties for each voter challenged.”
– When Matthews forwarded the email and its 10,000 voter names to local elections officials, she made no mention of the group’s partisan ties or Heim’s long history in the state of falsely pushing voter fraud claims.
