TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida wants local election officials to use data collected by far-right activists, some of whom wrongly believe the 2020 election was stolen, to potentially remove people from the state’s voter rolls, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
The network of activists has collected voter data in 24 states, and on May 3, one of them emailed the Florida-specific information to a top state election official. It contained the names of approximately 10,000 voters from across the state. The group is calling for them to be investigated for possible removal from the voter rolls, a process commonly called list maintenance.
The state’s chief election official then forwarded that information to county election supervisors and asked them to “take action.”
“I apologize for the delay in forwarding the following email and attachment from a concerned citizen about potential interstate registered voters,” Maria Matthews, the director of the Florida Division of Elections, wrote in a May 15 email, two weeks after it was originally sent, the 10,000 names.
Matthews acknowledged that it was unclear how the list of names was compiled or where the data came from.
“I do not know exactly when the information was compiled and what sources were consulted to derive this list,” she writes.
The “concerned citizen” who sent the May 3 email was Dan Heim, a longtime Florida resident activist who has made baseless claims of voter fraud throughout the state. He told Matthews in the email that he was working with a group that helped create a program called EagleAI (pronounced “Eagle Eye”), a database full of voter rolls and other data that promises to quickly sort through the data. browse and find registrations that may be suspected based on other sources.
It was founded by a retired physician, Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr., and rolled out last year to a group of conservative election activists in the Election Integrity Network. That group was founded by former Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Last year, a special grand jury in Georgia unanimously recommended that she be indicted for her role in overturning that state’s 2020 election. (She has not been charged in this case.)
“The left is going to hate this,” Mitchell said last year during an EagleAI demonstration for the Election Integrity Network. ‘They’ll hate it. But we love it.”
That comment was made in videos of program demonstrations obtained by NBC News last year. Conservative activists in attendance were guided through personally reviewing voter registrations one by one, looking up home addresses on Google Maps to see if the address resembled a house, searching online for obituaries, and creating lists of questionable registrations to report to local officials.
The use of EagleAI data to collect voter rolls has raised concerns from All Voting is Local Action, a multi-state voting rights group.
In a letter sent Friday morning and first obtained by NBC News, the group asks Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd to tell local election officials to “disregard” the email containing the 10,000 voters’ names. , to encourage counties to “not conduct list maintenance.” based on unreliable and unreviewed data, including from EagleAI and similar databases,” and not to use any state election research firm created by Governor Ron DeSantis to conduct any form of communication that may be considered “inappropriate or threatening.” are experienced.
“The list did not include information about the data source or methodology used to identify these voters,” said the letter, which was signed by a collection of voting rights groups. “Making frivolous challenges is a criminal offense in Florida, punishable by a misdemeanor for any challenged voter.”
The letter was also signed by the NAACP, Common Cause Florida, the Legal Defense Fund and the Advancement Project.
It claims the email to Matthews could also violate state law that says someone challenging a voter’s eligibility must live in the same county as the voter. In that case, Heim could not challenge 10,000 voters unless he lived in the same county with each of them.
Brad Ashwell, Florida state director of All Voting is Local Action, told NBC News that disputing thousands of names at once could leave election officials stuck chasing false claims of possible voter fraud.
“It is a voter suppression technique and can bog down the election machinery at critical points,” he said. “EagleAI has been watching us for a while and it’s honestly disturbing when we saw this email. Not just because the state is sending this list of voters to supervisors, but actually undermining state law on a few fronts.”
His group also has a presence in the top seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but he says Florida is the first state to see so much movement to get EagleAI data into list maintenance. process.
Wesley Wilcox, supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, said 95% of the documents identified in his county were documents his office has already identified for voter roll maintenance — registrations that have already been deleted or are scheduled to be deleted for disposal in accordance with the law.
The plates were also mislabeled as “Martin County.”
“If I’m held to a 100% accuracy rate, I think I can expect the same accuracy,” he added.
Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Christina White said the list she received from the state included only one voter from her county who may also have been registered in another state.
“As a matter of due diligence and per our standard procedures, we have contacted the other jurisdiction to determine if this is the same voter. We await additional information and will take appropriate action based on our collective findings,” she said.
Matthews did not return a request for comment, but Mark Ard, the Florida Department of State’s director of external affairs, said: “It is not unusual for the department and/or election supervisors to receive information from concerned citizens about possible exclusion and /or potential voter fraud.”
“Regardless of the source, when the Department receives list maintenance information, we share that information with the Supervisors of Elections to act accordingly,” Ard said. However, neither the Department nor the regulators would take action to change a voter’s record, remove a voter from the rolls, or refer a voter for investigation without first conducting due diligence to determine that there is credible and reliable information exists to support the voter. initial information provided.”
A man who answered Heim’s phone number hung up after an NBC News reporter identified himself. Heim also did not respond to an email request for comment.
Richards did not respond to a request for comment. Last year, he emphasized in a statement that EagleAI does not make decisions about voter eligibility.
It “simply points to voter registrations that require review by election officials,” he said in an email.
Florida withdrew its membership from another interstate registry program, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), more than a year ago after right-wing blogs spread conspiracy theories about the program. ERIC was run by member states and used personal, protected data such as driver’s license numbers to ensure accuracy when voter registrations were flagged for problems.
Heim himself has a long history of falsely pushing voter fraud claims in Florida.
He is one of the leaders of a group called “Defend Florida,” which has traveled around the state documenting voter fraud and then uses the false information it collects to lobby state lawmakers to change Florida’s voter laws.
In 2022, he met with Republican Senator Travis Hutson of Florida to try to claim that his group had uncovered tens of thousands of cases of voter fraud in Florida. After weeks of asking the group to provide the information, Hutson ultimately turned over only 230 names, none of whom had committed voter fraud, according to a review by then-Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a Republican who is now a member of the Congress. .
“They were in my office quite a bit,” Hutson recalled in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. “After begging for their data, they finally brought me a list of 230 votes that they said were cast illegally. It wasn’t the tens of thousands they claim.”
He said he passed the information on to Lee, who after a review said none of the flagged voters had voted more than once.
The group “said things as if one person would vote in Miami and hours later in the [Florida] Panhandle,” Hutson said. “You can’t even make that drive in eight hours.”
When Matthews forwarded the email and the names of 10,000 voters to local election officials, she made no mention of the group’s partisan ties or Heim’s long history in the state of falsely pushing for voter fraud.
She simply asked for “action,” based in part on the EagleAI data.
“Please take action… as you deem appropriate and helpful based on the information and current status of registered voters in your system,” she wrote.
Matt Dixon reported from Florida and Jane C. Timm from New York.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
