Augusta area man created a tool to challenge voter registrations. Trump’s allies may use it.

People who question the integrity of the 2020 election and allies of former President Donald Trump want to help regular citizens ask election officials to clean the voter rolls. That effort has alarmed experts who worry that local government workers will be inundated with requests they cannot vet quickly enough, leading to disenfranchisement in 2024.

Anyone can create challenges using a software program called EagleAI Network that pulls in voter registration and history data from secretaries of state, property tax and land use data from counties, change of address records from the US Post Office, obituary data, and criminal records.

Experts cited myriad problems with a system that broadly takes public information and cross-references it to try to find people who shouldn’t be on the voter rolls.

“When citizen volunteers decide to play armchair election administrators, they often conflate people who don’t feel eligible with people who are actually not eligible, and that’s a dangerous conflation,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

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How EagleAI got started

Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards, whose business is based in the Augusta area, said he started EagleAI in response to the 2020 election, after which he said he downloaded the Georgia secretary of state’s voter rolls and allegedly found people who should not have voted. He provided no evidence for this claim when asked and said he no longer has the records.

Richards said his aim is to flag simple data errors like the difference between “John Smith” in one database and “John W. Smith,” in another. EagleAI can help find users for example, someone who is registered to vote at one address but told the post office they moved.

President Joe Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes in 2020, and there is no evidence of fraud. The narrow margin nonetheless led to Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a fellow Republican, and pressuring him to “find” the votes he would need to win the election.

The program’s name, pronounced “Eagle Eye,” harkens back to an old voter suppression effort in the South called Operation Eagle Eye that the Republican National Committee created in order to help elect Barry Goldwater in 1964. Richards said he had never heard of that program and used the name because he and his associates are Eagle Scouts, the highest…