The election board in Forsyth County rejected an effort Friday to cancel 742 voter registrations whose eligibility was questioned using software called EagleAI to identify individuals who likely moved from Georgia.
The board upheld 45 other voter challenges that included more detailed information beyond EagleAI’s spreadsheets, including screenshots of government websites that showed the voters had recently registered in Florida or North Carolina.
The decisions on this round of voter challenges came as Republicans plan to contest the eligibility of more voters ahead of the presidential election, a move they say is necessary to reduce the possibility of illegal voting by people who no longer live in Georgia.
But voting rights groups say they’re concerned that legitimate voters could be wrongfully canceled by partisan activists. Few cases of out-of-state voting or double-voting have been proved by state investigators over the years, and Georgia law requires voters to provide ID before they can cast a ballot.
Credit: Jamie Spaar
Credit: Jamie Spaar
Barbara Luth, the chairwoman of the elections board in Forsyth, a conservative-leaning suburban county north of Atlanta, said she wouldn’t vote to remove voter registrations based on a spreadsheet without seeing where the data came from.
“I’m not going to uphold a challenge that we have no real information on because that’s going to get us in trouble,” Luth said. “We’re looking for more individualized evidence.”
EagleAI CEO Rick Richards said his data is accurate — based on voter lists showing someone had registered in another state after they last participated in elections in Georgia — and the board should have accepted the challenges without demanding more details.
Credit: Jamie Spaar
Credit: Jamie Spaar
“These people, having moved, are no longer eligible voters,” Richards told the board. “They should be removed immediately because according to Georgia law, they are no longer eligible.”
Georgia law allows any voter in a county to contest an unlimited number of voter registrations, a movement driven almost entirely by Republicans who are skeptical of election accuracy.
About 250,000 voter challenges were filed in 2020 and over 100,000 since then, most of which have been dismissed by county election boards.
A new Georgia voter challenge law goes into effect Monday which calls for upholding challenges if a voter registers in a different jurisdiction, died, or registered at a nonresidential address. National change of address data won’t be sufficient evidence to sustain a voter challenge, and challenges won’t be considered within 45 days of an election.
The Forsyth board repeatedly voted 3-2 on voter challenges, with Republican-appointed members in favor of canceling registrations and Democrats opposed. Luth, the chairwoman appointed by a nonpartisan superior court judge, was the deciding vote.
Rachel Lastinger of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia said voter registrations should be removed by the state’s normal cancellation process, which includes multiple notifications and yearslong waiting periods before taking away someone’s right to vote. Election officials canceled 189,000 inactive registrations last year.
“I don’t think any of these challenges should have been upheld. I think they were all baseless,” Lastinger said. “I don’t think there was sufficient evidence.”
Of the 742 voter challenges the board dismissed, 197 of the registrations have already been canceled and 531 are on schedule to be removed, said Anita Tucker, a Democratic appointee to the elections board. That left just 14 active voters on the challenge list, which Tucker said indicated to her that the information was outdated.
“Anybody can create a spreadsheet. It has not been vetted by anyone that I know of,” Tucker said. “For anybody to say, ‘Trust me, it’s good’ and for nobody to have verified that for us ... this is insufficient evidence.”
The Forsyth County resident who filed the challenges, Stefan Bartelski, said more registrations should have been canceled.
“This board is not really interested in making the voter rolls as accurate as they should be,” Bartelski said. “This board often feels that they must remind us about the rights of voters being more important than our challenges. They overlooked the fact that bloated voter rolls enable a dilution of the vote of lawful voters.”
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