It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list.
While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new, what the federal government sought through the lawsuit—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file—was not.
Bellows, a spunky, no-nonsense 50-year-old who grew up in a log cabin without running water, already had received a litany of demand letters, public records requests, and lawsuits throughout her five years serving as the top election integrity official in Maine. Citing the National Voter Registration Act, most of the requests for the state’s voter data had the ostensible aim of ensuring Maine was adequately removing the names of individuals who should not be on the voter roll. But this lawsuit was the first of its kind from the government itself.
The September legal complaint was an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain voter roll data from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections.
In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from right-wing groups like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country.
“The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government.”
“The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government,” says Bellows, who spent eight years as the executive director of the Maine ACLU before assuming her current post. “These requests are not unlike the requests that the organizations they used to be affiliated with have asked for years.” But unlike conservative legal organizations, she adds, “the Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.”
Riordan and Dhillon have been pursuing Maine’s voter information since July, when the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent Bellows a letter requesting the state’s unredacted registration list. Bellows wrote a careful response referencing federal court opinions and state statutes that preclude her from sharing the voter roll without appropriate redactions. In return, the DOJ sent her another threatening letter, followed by the ironically timed lawsuit on National Voter Registration Day.
Maine isn’t the only state the DOJ contacted. Over the last six months, it has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics. The DOJ has formally sued 14 states for the data so far, 12 of which are led by Democrats. (The sole exceptions are Vermont, which has a Republican governor but is otherwise deeply blue, and New Hampshire, where Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has publicly disagreed with President Donald Trump’s plan to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterms to give Republicans more seats.) Bellows believes Maine was among the first two states to be sued “because of animus”—also known as old-fashioned retribution.
The Justice Department already has tried to retaliate against Trump’s political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over allegations that he inflated the value of his real estate holdings. (A federal judge recently dismissed both indictments, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is reportedly weighing whether to re-indict them.) Bellows, though lesser known, is likely on the administration’s radar for other reasons, too. Citing the 14th Amendment’s clause barring officials who “engage in” insurrection from holding future office, she attempted to remove Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot based on his connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
But Bellows, who is now running for governor, may not be the only one harmed by the DOJ data grab and the spurious claims supporting it. In 2024, crude analyses of voter roll data by right wingers led election officials in Waterford Township, Michigan, and Virginia to remove duly registered voters from the rolls.
So far, challenges like these have taken place on a much smaller scale: state by state or even county by county. The DOJ’s current effort to assemble every state’s voter data poses an exponentially larger threat to voting rights. More than a dozen state election officials, former DOJ staff, and election experts told Mother Jones that a national database of voter registration information could lead to massive data breaches of Americans’ private information and reinforce false narratives about the frequency of voter fraud—narratives Trump and his allies could weaponize to challenge election outcomes. Worse yet, the bad data could give Republican-led states cover to illegally cull eligible voters from their rolls, stopping certain people from voting at all.
“These unprecedented demands for vast amounts of voter data are part of a larger pattern of actions indicating a reckless grab for power over American elections,” Bellows says.
It could also lead to a vast expansion of the number of citizens who appear on Trump’s hit list—one that, depending on your personal data, may soon include you.
The right-wing campaign to weaponize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which former Attorney General Eric Holder once called the “crown jewel” of the department, dates back more than two decades.
After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, National Review called for a radical restructuring of the division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” wrote national correspondent John J. Miller. “Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers.”
“My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.”
And a year later, that’s precisely what they did. Attorney General John Ashcroft tapped Brad Schlozman, a Kansas-based lawyer with no prior civil rights litigation experience, as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. His responsibilities included overseeing hiring and supervision for the division’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws. Schlozman did little to hide his disdain for the section he now led. “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he wrote to a former colleague in July 2003.
Schlozman embarked on a hiring spree of what he called “RTAs,” short for “right-thinking Americans,” recruiting lawyers from the Federalist Society, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and the Bush-Cheney campaign. A joint investigation by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that “virtually all of the attorneys (97 percent) hired by Schlozman whose political and ideological affiliations were evident in the hiring process were Republican or conservative.”
Veteran civil rights lawyers with decades of experience began leaving in droves, including the well-respected chief of the voting section, Joe Rich. Schlozman made Hans von Spakovsky, who had been among the first major figures in the GOP to push the myth of widespread voter fraud, de facto head of the section.
Soon, the department’s political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve GOP-backed laws that were regarded as racially discriminatory, including a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan in Texas that eliminated two majority-minority districts and a Georgia voter ID law that disproportionately harmed Black voters.
“You take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States,” Robert Kengle, the deputy chief of the voting section from 1999 to 2005, told Mother Jones’ Ari Berman in his 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot. “These guys didn’t believe in the laws of the United States. They came in to work for an institution for which they had the utmost contempt.”
One of the attorneys hired by Schlozman was J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner in Virginia who had served as a Bush-Cheney poll watcher in Florida. Rich described him as “Exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman.”
Adams helped bring the DOJ’s first-ever Voting Rights Act case on behalf of white voters, who claimed they were discriminated against by the Black head of the local Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Career lawyers viewed it as a perversion of the law, which was intended to protect Black voters who were disenfranchised by segregationist whites in states like Mississippi.
By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the DOJ’s inspector general found that Schlozman had violated federal law and committed misconduct by “improperly [considering] political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.” But the anti-voting positions of the likes of von Spakovsky and Adams had already become institutionalized and were spreading within the GOP.
A couple of years later, in 2010, Adams loudly accused the Obama administration of anti-white bias when the DOJ dropped a case he spearheaded alleging that white voters were intimidated at the polls in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party. An internal review found no evidence of improper political interference, but by this point, Adams had resigned in protest. He would go on to become head of the right-wing legal group PILF in 2015. In addition to filing lawsuits against local jurisdictions to force them to remove voters from their rolls, PILF published two reports in 2016 and 2017, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” that sought to validate Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens.
The reports, which included names, addresses, and private information like Social Security numbers, claimed that more than 5,500 noncitizens had registered to vote in Virginia and 1,852 people had cast nearly 7,500 illegal ballots since the late 1980s. “This is the real foreign influence on American elections,” Adams told Fox News. “Foreigners are getting on American voter rolls and, as we documented, casting ballots by the thousands.”
PILF called on the Justice Department to bring felony charges against the voters it identified. Republican political activists drew up plans to post signs at polling places warning of voter fraud, which Adams said should be “in Spanish” to be “effective.”
It soon became clear, however, that PILF had relied on faulty methodology. As Mother Jones previously reported, “Alien Invasion II” spotlighted the “astonishing” example of one voter, Maureen Erickson, who listed a Guatemalan address on her registration form. “Ms. Erickson voted in 14 different elections—most recently in 2008—before her registration was canceled,” the report stated.
But it turned out that Erickson was a US citizen living in Guatemala as a missionary. “I think it is odd that they chose ‘Maureen Erickson’ as their poster child for voter fraud,” her husband, Todd Erickson, wrote in a letter to the Washington Times after it picked up the story. “There was obviously not much additional research done on the person that they held up as an example of this illegal activity.”
When Virginia election officials warned PILF that it was using unreliable data—such as targeting individuals who did not check a citizenship box at the DMV—to identify “suspected aliens,” PILF staffer Logan Churchwell agreed in an email to Adams that their concerns could “be true.” But this was an opportunity, Churchwell said, to “convert pushback into official confusion to justify our call for a top-down overhaul.”
“The fog of war favors the aggressor here,” added Churchwell, who remains research director at PILF.
In 2018, four Virginia voters whom PILF falsely accused of voting illegally filed a lawsuit against Adams and PILF, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—which empowers individuals to sue when vigilante groups threaten their 14th Amendment rights—through “a modern, covert, and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.” PILF settled the case before it went to trial, with Adams agreeing to apologize to the plaintiffs and PILF pledging to redact sensitive personal information.
The reports should have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of overhyped fraud claims and the misuse of sensitive voter information, but Trump and his allies were undeterred and determined to spread such misinformation to a much bigger audience.
After claiming with no proof that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally, Trump brought back veterans of the Bush Justice Department, including Adams and von Spakovsky, as members of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Von Spakovsky advised the commission to reprise the Schlozman-era playbook and exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” from serving on it. He and Adams secretly advised Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then–Kansas secretary of state, on the commission’s first major action: a sweeping request for sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including party affiliation, voter history, and Social Security numbers. Kobach wrote that it would be “very helpful in the Commission’s work identifying fraudulent registrations and other forms of voter fraud.”
But the request, made in June 2017, infamously backfired. The Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” His GOP counterpart in Louisiana said the “President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release.” Even Kobach, in his position as the top election official in Kansas, was unable to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers because they couldn’t be divulged by state law, nor could secretaries of state from Indiana, Maine, and New Hampshire, who also served on the commission. In the end, 21 states refused to provide any data, while the rest only partially complied.
The commission had tried to validate Trump’s fraud claims, but it disbanded after less than a year while facing at least eight lawsuits. A draft staff report of its findings included a section on “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues” that was, tellingly, left blank.
The commission’s failure should have put to bed the myth of widespread voter fraud once and for all—and prevented the federal government from ever again asking for such extensive information on voters. But Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election convinced more of his supporters that elections were rigged, emboldening groups like PILF to turbocharge their efforts to restrict access to the ballot. In the runup to the 2024 election, Trump and his allies filed scores of lawsuits designed to make it harder to vote and easier to question election outcomes. PILF, along with the RNC and Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, were at the forefront of this legal onslaught.
When Trump returned to the White House, an emboldened MAGA movement once again set its sights on transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its voting section from a place that is entrusted with protecting people’s right to vote to one that jeopardizes it.
“This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as a high-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.”
A week after the 2024 election, Cleta Mitchell, a recent chair of PILF’s board (von Spakovsky is the current chair) and an attorney involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, called on the administration to fire “every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning.”
The now-reinvigorated wolves were back in the henhouse. Two days after the inauguration, the department’s political appointees ordered the Civil Rights Division to freeze work on all new cases. Shortly thereafter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had traveled to Pennsylvania in 2020 to amplify Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was confirmed as US attorney general. The department put Mac Warner, a former West Virginia secretary of state who claimed that the CIA stole the 2020 election, in charge of the Civil Rights Division on an interim basis.
Over the winter and spring, the Trump DOJ began systematically withdrawing from voting rights cases filed under the Biden administration, refusing in nearly every instance to meet with the career attorneys who worked on them. “There was an utter lack of interest in what the day-to-day work of the voting section entailed,” says one former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division.
On March 31, when the department dropped a case challenging voting restrictions passed in Georgia in 2021, Bondi alleged that the Biden administration had “fabricated claims of false voter suppression.”
“The press release from the Georgia case was insulting to all the career lawyers who worked on it,” says another former DOJ lawyer. “To call something fraudulent from the institution you now lead was deeply troubling.”
Days later, the Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally whose law firm had filed several lawsuits attacking voting rights, as head of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon had amplified Trump’s false claims of fraud as a legal adviser to his 2020 campaign, calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results.
Dhillon removed the division’s longtime mandate of stopping racial discrimination in voting from the section’s mission statement and instead pledged to address Trump-inspired priorities that included “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”
By the end of April, Trump’s appointees had dismissed every active case in the voting section and reassigned the section’s chief and five top managers to the obscure complaint adjudication office, the DOJ’s version of Siberia. Career attorneys who’d stayed during Trump’s first administration and thought they could survive Trump 2.0 decided to leave en masse. Just a few months in, more than 250 attorneys had departed the Civil Rights Division, 70 percent of the total staff, and the number of career attorneys in the voting section had shrunk from 30 to just three.
At the end of May, Maureen Riordan, who had been litigation counsel at PILF during the Biden years, took over as acting head of the voting section. A 20-year veteran of the DOJ who spent much of her career in the voting section, Riordan had resigned when Biden took office. At PILF, she had focused on filing lawsuits against various states, aimed at obtaining their voter roll information for the purpose of analyzing it for purported fraud.
When she returned to the DOJ under Trump, the department’s work had effectively become inseparable from the mission of the right-wing “election integrity” organizations whose leaders now staffed the new administration. With the MAGA takeover complete, the voting section launched its most audacious scheme yet, reprising the Trump administration’s demand for sensitive voter data from all 50 states. And this time, it would retaliate against those who refused to comply.
A couple of weeks before the DOJ began demanding Maine’s voter rolls, PILF, Riordan’s old employer, sent its own letter to Bellows, alleging that its assessment of commercially available data and newspaper obituaries suggested there were more than 18,000 “apparently deceased” people on Maine’s voter rolls.
Responding to that previously unreported accusation, Bellows called its claim a “damned lie from an organization that cares more about conspiracy theories than election integrity.” Churchwell, from PILF, says their data collection methods have evolved since 2017 to prioritize credit data over other “cheap” commercial options: “We’ve raised the standard. Your experts are in the wailing and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness stage of their activism, and my heart goes out to them.”
For starters, every month, Maine’s 487 municipal election clerks review death records from the state’s vital records bureau and cancel the registrations of individuals who have died. As a fail-safe, Maine also compares its voter roll to the Social Security Administration’s Limited Access Death Master File at least once annually. Moreover, even if a deceased person’s name did appear on the voter roll for a short time, that does not mean a vote was illegally cast in their name.
This wasn’t the first time PILF made such a claim. The group sued Michigan in 2021, alleging that its assessment of publicly attainable data showed there were 25,000 dead voters on Michigan’s rolls. A federal judge dismissed the claim in March 2024. In May, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected PILF’s argument a second time, concluding that Michigan makes an “inherently rational, sensible attempt at maintaining accurate voter registration lists.” (In November, PILF asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the lower court’s decision.)
But PILF succeeded in advancing the voting fraud narrative—even if its lawsuit has so far failed. As is often the case, the rulings on the Michigan lawsuit didn’t get nearly as much attention as the claims that precipitated it. “Usually, sensational allegations of crimes go viral,” Bellows says, “and the less sensational finding that people are innocent often doesn’t have the same reach.”
Most of the lawsuits—whether from groups like PILF or the mightier Justice Department—allege violations of the National Voter Registration Act. Congress passed the 1993 bipartisan law with the intention of making it easier to register to vote. Dubbed the “Motor Voter Act,” the law simplified voter registration by making the process accessible at DMVs and other public agencies across the country. The law also included a provision to ensure that state voter rolls, which were anticipated to add new voters, were properly maintained. The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of managing elections to the states, and consequently, the act doesn’t tell states how exactly they should maintain their rolls; it merely says they should “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters.”
Bellows attests that Maine is doing just that. In February 2025, the state’s election division canceled 180,584 inactive voter registrations—the largest bulk removal in nearly 20 years. But the act’s open-ended language has provided an opening for election denialism crusaders, including the ones who now run the DOJ.
“Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and intimidate individual citizens.”
“These groups are trying to weaponize the law in a way that’s contrary to the purposes of the statute,” says Bains, the former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Most of these lawsuits that we’re talking about are aimed at pursuing mass purges of exactly the nature that the statute was written to prevent.”
At least 40 states have received written requests from the Justice Department for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. DOJ officials have said they eventually want the data from every state. So far, only two—Indiana and Wyoming—have complied, though the administration has adopted a harder stance in recent weeks. As of early December, the department has filed lawsuits against 14 states, beginning with Maine and Oregon.
“On the surface, it may seem like regular oversight, but it’s not,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar argued during a September press briefing with the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “The DOJ has the backing of the federal government. They’re trying to use the immense power to intimidate states into complying.”
At the same briefing, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson outlined multiple ways the data demanded by the department could be used vindictively.
“Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and intimidate individual citizens, political adversaries, and potentially deter entire communities from voting,” Benson said. “It could also be used to pressure states to remove otherwise eligible citizens from the rolls based on pernicious or suspect information.”
Administration officials have yet to explain their reasons for trying to create a national voter roll, but the DOJ confirmed to States Newsroom that the data was “being screened for ineligible voter entries.”
The agency is working with the Department of Homeland Security to run voter information through Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, an online platform that provides access to various government databases in one place. Since its inception in 1987, the tool has been used to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits by checking alien identification numbers assigned to them by DHS. The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the tool in recent months, adding Social Security numbers and passport information to the system. As Mother Jones reported last month, DHS is also trying to connect every state’s driver’s license database to SAVE, so states can run their entire voter rolls through the database at one time. (A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers SAVE, says states will need to ensure they are using the platform lawfully.)
The allegation that noncitizens are flooding state voter rolls is not supported by any data. One 2016 survey of 42 voting jurisdictions by the Brennan Center found just 30 cases of possible noncitizen voting out of nearly 24 million votes. Statistically, that’s one ten-thousandth of 1 percent. Further, voter registration forms require Americans to affirm they are citizens, under penalty of perjury. The same form warns that those who lie could be fined, imprisoned, or deported. They’d also risk their future eligibility for citizenship. “To jeopardize that opportunity by voting just doesn’t make sense,” Nevada’s Aguilar says.
While using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents (for example, a man whose license says Nick but whose passport says Nicholas). A lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in September warned that DHS and the DOJ are “encouraging and enabling” states to search their voter rolls against SAVE, which the lawsuit alleges may culminate in some states “purging voter rolls.”
In November, a federal judge agreed that the new use of SAVE was concerning: “The Court is troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government’s actions,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan. However, she declined to block the administration from using it because the plaintiffs hadn’t yet identified someone who had been directly harmed.
Even if the DOJ doesn’t find any legitimate evidence of noncitizen voting, false matches would produce sensational headlines across the MAGA-verse, giving the administration more ammunition to undermine trust in elections.
“My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files, and we know there are X or Y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers.”
The DOJ declined to comment for this story.
Beyond the possibility of voters being disenfranchised, the League of Women Voters and EPIC argue that every person’s federal right to privacy would be encroached by the DOJ and DHS sharing data among themselves and state governments. Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 specifically to prevent the federal government from creating “formal or de facto national data banks” or “centralized Federal information systems” that would integrate the personal data of Americans stored at separate agencies, the lawsuit points out.
Add to all this the fact that a national voter file could also be a gold mine for hackers, especially as the Trump administration dismantles efforts to combat foreign and domestic election interference.
“The danger is once you compile all this information, then hackers only have to go to one place instead of going to all 50-plus jurisdictions that run elections,” says Eileen O’Connor, who worked in the DOJ’s voting section for nearly a decade, including during Trump’s first term. “It’s just a hacker’s dream to have all of this private, sensitive information collected somewhere.”
In its efforts to inspect state voter rolls, the DOJ is also, evidently, considering sharing Americans’ personal data with outside election denial groups. Rick Richards, a retired physician from Georgia with no experience as an election official, has met with Riordan and marketed his mass voter registration challenge system called EagleAI, which he helped develop with Cleta Mitchell’s support, to the DOJ.
“We demonstrated the software to the DOJ. They like it. They would like to use it. Apparently, we can get data they can’t,” he said during a meeting hosted by Mitchell’s group, the Election Integrity Network, according to a transcript obtained by Mother Jones. “I am in conversation with them about letting us have a task, a federal task, to bring their data into what we’re doing and then be able to use the federal data, SAVE data, Social Security data, other data in here as well.”
Despite its name, EagleAI uses no artificial intelligence. Like PILF, EagleAI relies on incomplete information, such as self-reported address changes registered with the US Postal Service and datasets purchased from private entities like utilities, credit card companies, or magazine publishers. Richards boasted on the same call that EagleAI flagged more than 50 percent of Fulton County, Georgia, voter registrations as “potential problems”—an indication of the system’s dubious accuracy.
Had the right-wing election integrity skeptics behind EagleAI actually believed the county’s voter roll was teeming with fraudulently registered voters, they likely would have presented these concerns to local officials. But according to Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s director of registration and elections, that hasn’t happened; her voter roll is audited monthly using verified data sources, and she’s never heard from EagleAI, which she called an “unverified third-party group.”
In response to questions from Mother Jones, Richards claimed that “the EagleAI Network program no longer exists,” even though his email signature still includes that affiliation and the group’s data was used to challenge more than 900 voters in New Jersey as recently as a month ago.
If the DOJ takes up Richards on his offer to use EagleAI on state voter rolls the department is suing to collect, it wouldn’t be the first time Riordan has worked at a place that relies on faulty data to spread questionable conclusions about voter fraud.
Normally, the DOJ’s voting section would work to prevent these kinds of efforts from affecting Americans’ ability to vote. Now, the voting section itself is in on the effort. “The main activity the section seems to be engaged in at this point,” says Levitt, the former deputy assistant attorney general, “is something illegal.”
