A demonstration of a new tool that could potentially help clean up voter rolls was given on Wednesday, Sept. 13 in Columbia County.
EagleAI NETWork was created by Dr. Rick Richards after the 2020 election because he saw an issue that needed to be fixed. He said articles he read in January 2021 ticked him off because they all implied that Georgians were stupid, didn’t know how to count votes and more.
“EagleAI NETwork is a non-partisan, data-driven, objective tool,” Richards said. “EagleAI NETwork’s purpose is to gather lots of reliable data into one place so that in can efficiently be reviewed by county election officials as part of their routine voter list maintenance as required by federal, state and local regulations as part of their normal policies and procedures. Individual data review by citizen volunteers is an additional step to assist those officials.”
EagleAI NETwork takes information from multiple sources, including obituaries, the national change of address through the post office, Secretary of State data voter rolls, Secretary of State business data and more, and puts it all in one database, Richards said. He added they recently purchased property data for every property in the United States and are in negotiations with a company to get information on every business in the United States.
“With EagleAI we are combining the collection of data, multiple sources of third-party data,” Richards said. “We are then presenting that in a very efficient formatted fashion to make it easy for people to do the review and having a human being make the decision EagleAI makes no decisions whatsoever. It just presents data, that’s all it’s doing. It presents data to the people who already in power to make the decision. They’re the ones that make the decision. It’s just a tool.”
Richards gave a demonstration of how the system works. He searched for people over the age of 113 in Fulton County because that is the oldest known person in Georgia. The system came up with multiple people over this age. With the system, you can then click a button to search online for obituaries and if you find proof the person is dead, you can take a screenshot of that and upload it in the system to prove they are no longer alive.
Addresses can also be checked with EagleAI and if there’s a question about one, there is a spot in the program to click that take the user to a map so they can check if the address is residential, commercial or a Post Office.
Individuals or county can subscribe and use EagleAI to check voters, and if there’s an issue the person being questioned can be flagged in the system so the local elections office can check the information. He added that county employees could also use the system for voter maintenance instead of what they are currently using or instead of relying on citizens to use it and flag anything they find that is questionable.
“The computer does not make the decision, it provides data, a human being makes a decision and clicks a button. With that click of the button, then a process ensues,” Richards said.
But before doing all that work, Richards encouraged everyone to talk to their local elections office to see how they could help.
“Don’t do this without going and talking to your county,” Richards said. “That’s just not nice, that’s rude. Talk to them, call them, tell them you’re interested in helping and ask them how you can be the best help they’re experts, we’re not. They might not need help with deceased because they’ve got a really good system. They might, as I did, I met with our folks and asked what does it take to meet your criteria to do this. And they told me.”
During the meeting Richards said there were over 200 people in beta and delta using the software in multiple states. He added that it was set to go live in Georgia on Sept. 14.
Richards briefly spoke about voter suppression and said EagleAI has nothing to do with it. Instead, it is a tool to make sure that the people who are registered to vote are eligible to vote.
“We’re preventing voter suppression. One person who is not supposed to vote, votes, you vote, your vote has been suppressed. Period,” Richards said.
EagleAI is free to use, but the user does have to buy a license from Clairs, which is similar to Microsoft. Richards said he is making no money with the project, but if a county wishes to use it, due to Georgia state law, they must be charged fair market value to use it.
While EagleAI has been mentioned at the Columbia County Board of Elections meetings, no decision has been made about whether or not it will be used.
Stephanie Hill is the managing editor and covers Columbia County government for The Augusta Press. Reach her at stephanie@theaugustapress.com.
