A Tool Built by Election Deniers Said These Voters Were Dead. We Found Them Alive.
Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Image Ahead of the midterms, conservative election activists discussed plans to wield a powerful new weapon in the war against fraud: a data tool built by one of their own that could identify suspicious voters and help with contesting their ballots.
Key points
- In the run-up to the midterms, on right-wing media and on private organizing calls, EIN participants outlined plans to search voter rolls with a software tool known as ELLY’s Election Monitor and contest ballots the tool deemed suspicious.
- The tool doesn’t have access to personal identifiers such as voters’ Social Security or driver’s license numbers or full dates of birth, which increases the potential for mismatches involving people with the same names.
- In Georgia, State Election Board members and top staffers have urged counties to use the tool to search their voter rolls for signs of fraud.
The system was put to the test this week in Forsyth County, Georgia, where a member of the county’s election board provided other officials with what he suggested was evidence of wrongdoing: four allegedly dead voters.
Additional details
- The board member who initiated the Forsyth County challenge, Max Clavijo, is a member of the Election Integrity Network, a group led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell that works to restrict voting and tighten election laws and rules.
- Mitchell worked closely with Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election and, since he retook the presidency, has been central to his push to assert greater federal control over voting.
- Accusations that the data is unreliable were “horse hockey,” Richards told ProPublica, explaining this was “a Southern colloquialism for B.S.” Late last week, according to several people familiar with the matter, Clavijo circulated documents to board members and Forsyth County’s election director.
- The effort, though, shows that even after last week’s blue wave, those who believe the 2020 election was stolen have continued to relentlessly search for ways to contest Republican losses.
- Based on data from ELLY, Clavijo questioned whether the names of more than 22,000 people on the county’s voter roll were correct and disputed the eligibility of 69 voters.
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