Georgia election board promotes new voter-roll tool ahead of midterms
The creator of a controversial software used by conservative activists to challenge voter registrations they view as suspect is pitching a new program ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Rick Richards, a retired doctor from Augusta and creator of the program ELLY, frames it as a neutral, data-driven tool for identifying discrepancies in voter rolls and ineligible registrants. Election officials say the program is prone to errors, but it is being promoted by people who have cast doubts about the 2020 election, including staffers of the Georgia State Election Board.
In an unusual move last month, State Election Board Investigator Larry Duckworth sent the Chatham County Board of Registrars spreadsheets of about 220 voter registrations identified by ELLY that Duckworth deemed questionable, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“PLEASE INVESTIGATE ALL,” he wrote.
Election officials endlessly vet Georgia’s voter rolls. The rolls change frequently as new voters are added. Others move out of the state or are removed after years of inactivity.
But since the 2020 election, it’s become common for right-wing activists to analyze long lists of registrations and challenge voters for removal — an effort fueled by President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud.
After the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed a 2021 law allowing citizens to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations, conservative activists filed challenges by the thousands.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a voting advocacy organization, published a report Tuesday that found Georgia accounted for nearly half the more than 185,000 voter challenges made across the country in 2024. Very few were successful in removing voters, the Brennan Center found, “but they caused extensive problems for voters and election officials.”
Activists have used data from Richards’ earlier software, EagleAI, to file mass challenges. Those challenges have often been dismissed by county election boards for either not knowing enough about the underlying data or for the data’s inaccuracies.
Richards defends the approach, claiming county election boards didn’t seriously consider the voter challenges. “They just denied it,” he said at a recent State Election Board meeting.
‘No politics, just data’
Richards billed ELLY as an “upgrade” to voter roll list maintenance, drawing its data from more than 20 sources.
“No politics, just data,” he told the Republican-controlled state board.
Like EagleAI, ELLY uses a combination of publicly available sources, including property tax records, address changes, obituaries and voter roll information, according to Richards. But the data is missing key personal identifiers of voters, like driver’s license numbers, full birth dates and Social Security numbers that would help the software to pinpoint voters.
Voting rights organizations say the program’s inaccuracies could be used to disenfranchise voters. They also note that Richards isn’t a neutral figure and has worked with activists who believe Trump’s 2020 defeat was the result of fraud.
Kristin Nabers, Georgia director of the left-leaning All Voting Is Local, said the tool “appears to be nothing more than a rebrand of EagleAI.”
Cherokee County Elections Director Anne Dover tested ELLY against the official voting history data. It didn’t take her long to find problems.
“The voting history data in ELLY is consistently incorrect,” she wrote in an email to State Election Board members.
Dover said it flagged her spouse as potentially voting twice in the same election. The program also marked the wife of a county election board member listed as possibly dead. She’s alive, Dover said.
“It concerns me there are overzealous people out there that would turn someone in for voting twice when in fact it is just bad data,” she wrote in an email to board members.
Dover also checked a list of 50 voters flagged as living in nonresidential addresses. That also was not true, she said in an email to the board on Wednesday.
Georgia election officials do find errors or outdated registrations among the millions of properly registered voters. There are incorrectly spelled names, typos in addresses, wrong birth years. Some voters are registered with P.O. boxes, which isn’t allowed. To activists, this is evidence that people could commit fraud and influence the outcome of an election.
Richards acknowledged the false positives flagged by the tool but said determination of what to do with such information lies in the hands of election officials.
“ELLY surfaces discrepancies; it does not look for fraud, allege fraud, or claim to prove it,” he wrote to the AJC.
Over the course of several months, Richards and his son, John Richards III, have pitched ELLY and another program to election officials in Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island, according to email records and pitch materials obtained by left-leaning government watchdog American Oversight and first reported by NBC News.
The two also made a stop in Washington in February to present their software at a summit attended by federal officials and pro-Trump activists. And although Richards claims his efforts are not partisan, he has participated in Zoom calls hosted by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who supported efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.
Holly Kesler, a conservative activist in Georgia, hailed Richards’ presentation as “one of the best” at the Washington summit, according to an audio recording of a Zoom call obtained by the AJC. In an interview on LindellTV after the summit, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who bankrolled efforts to overturn the 2020 election, called ELLY an alternative to a multistate voter accuracy organization Georgia is a member of.
“It’s available for activists within their own states, and your own states can be using it,” he said. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said ELLY “is just phenomenal.”
Blake Evans, elections director in the secretary of state’s office, said it’s the job of election officials to maintain clean voter rolls using “good data” and protect “eligible Georgia voters that are living at valid addresses.”
Voter fraud is rare in Georgia, and allegations of ballot-stuffing, dead voters and underage voters have been dismissed by state investigations.
Georgia already has processes for removing ineligible voters. County election officials regularly review the voter rolls, and the state performs mass cancellations on odd years. Georgia purged nearly 471,000 voter registrations last year — one of the largest mass cancellations of inactive voters in U.S. history.
But the push for ELLY continues.
State Election Board Investigator Jason Frazier, an election skeptic and prolific voter challenger in Fulton County quietly hired by the board in May, presented ELLY after a county election board meeting in Chatham County last week, a county attorney told the AJC. State Election Board Executive Director James Mills and Frazier also promoted the program last week at a regional meeting of county election officials, according to Wayne County Election Supervisor Robby Smart.
Whether ELLY will catch on remains to be seen. The only known test of a county using EagleAI, ELLY’s predecessor, went nowhere.
Records show Columbia County, where Richards lives, entered a one-year, $2,000 contract with EagleAI in July 2024. Elections Board Executive Director Nancy Gay said the county never used it and terminated the contract.