El creador de EagleAI presenta la herramienta de depuración de padrones ELLY a funcionarios estatales

Dr. John "Rick" Richards Jr. created EagleAI in the run-up to the 2024 election with backing from the Election Integrity Network, founded by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who helped President Trump pressure state officials to overturn the 2020 election results. Columbia County, Georgia, was the only known county to sign a contract with EagleAI. Nancy Gay, the county's elections director, told reporters that the office never actually logged in to the program before the county terminated the contract in March 2025.

Georgia Elections Director Blake Evans was blunter. He told reporters that EagleAI "draws inaccurate conclusions and then spreads them as if they are facts," a characterization that captures the core problem with programs that use publicly available data to make definitive statements about voter eligibility.

Richards returned in early 2026 with two successor programs. ELLY is marketed to county-level officials and led by Richards Jr. It works by letting ordinary citizens cross-reference county voter registration data with aggregated public records: USPS address records, obituaries, and property tax information and Google Maps. Psephos is aimed at state-level officials and led by Richards's son, John W. Richards III. It adds commercial and government data to the same public records base.

Florida activist Kris Jurski, who built his own voter roll review tool called The People's Audit and has promoted election conspiracy theories, said publicly that he helped build ELLY. In a January 2026 Telegram post, Jurski showed ELLY flagging 94% of New Jersey voter registrations and 100% of Washington, D.C., registrations as "incomplete data or error."

Richards Jr. gave a nearly hour-long presentation on ELLY at the Georgia State Election Board meeting on March 18, 2026, where Trump allies hold a board majority. American Oversight obtained government records through Freedom of Information requests showing the Richards father-son team also met with Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskin's chief of staff, Matthew Alsager; Rhode Island state elections director Kathy Placencia; and a staffer at the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

In February 2026, Richards Jr. briefed election activists on ELLY at a Washington, D.C., summit convened by Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser who has promoted election conspiracy theories. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a major funder of 2020 election-reversal efforts, described ELLY at the summit as the "alternative to ERIC" and said it would be available to activists statewide.

Congress passed the National Voter Registration ActNational Voter Registration ActA 1993 federal law that requires states to offer voter registration at DMVs and agencies, and sets rules for maintaining voter rolls.Key ConceptNational Voter Registration ActA 1993 federal law that requires states to offer voter registration at DMVs and agencies, and sets rules for maintaining voter rolls.Open conceptBookmark in 1993 to standardize how states register voters and maintain their rolls. Section 20507 of Title 52 requires each state to "conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters" — but it sets strict guardrails: any removal program must be "uniform, nondiscriminatory, and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act," and states must complete systematic removal programs no later than 90 days before a federal election. The statute permits removal only for death, change of residence following a notice-and-nonvoting process, criminal conviction, or mental incapacity — not for citizenship suspicion alone.

The Supreme Court set the floor for what that "reasonable effort" standard permits in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., No. 16-980 (June 11, 2018), upholding Ohio's practice of sending return cards to nonvoters and removing those who didn't respond and didn't vote for six more years. Justice Alito's 5-4 majority opinion held that the NVRA prohibits removing voters "solely" for not voting, but allows nonvoting as one factor in a multi-step process. ELLY and SAVE operate in a different legal posture: they flag voters for citizenship status, not change of residence, using data sources the NVRA doesn't authorize.

ERIC was founded in 2012 by officials from seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, and Washington — who wanted a better tool for the list maintenance required by the NVRA. The founding catalyst was a February 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts report documenting that roughly one in eight voter registrations was no longer valid or significantly inaccurate, more than 1.8 million deceased individuals remained on rolls, and approximately 2.75 million people held registrations in more than one state. David Becker, then at the Pew Center on the States, was central to ERIC's design before leaving to found the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Eric used encoded, protected government data — Social Security numbers cross-referenced against death records, and driver's license numbers cross-referenced against change-of-address data — rather than public records, because Becker and the founding states understood that public data alone produces unacceptable false-positive rates. HAVA (the Help America Vote ActHelp America Vote ActA 2002 federal law passed after the 2000 election that modernized voting systems and required voters to provide ID numbers when registering.Key ConceptHelp America Vote ActA 2002 federal law passed after the 2000 election that modernized voting systems and required voters to provide ID numbers when registering.Open conceptBookmark, P.L. 107-252, enacted Oct. 29, 2002) provided the federal infrastructure that made state data-sharing legally sound. By 2022, 28 states and the District of Columbia had joined ERIC.

The Heritage Foundation's Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) began circulating a report in late 2022 falsely claiming that ERIC was designed to register Democrats rather than maintain rolls. PILF's president J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ official who leads voting-related litigation for Heritage-aligned causes, distributed materials to Republican state legislators framing ERIC as a voter-registration tool for Democrats. Louisiana left ERIC in January 2023, the first state to withdraw. Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and Texas followed in 2023, with more states departing through 2024.

Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network amplified the PILF campaign in its state-level organizing. More than a dozen Republican-led states have since left the partnership — reducing its membership from 34 jurisdictions to 28 by 2025. The gap those departures created is precisely the market ELLY and Psephos entered. ERIC's executive director Shane Hamlin wrote in a March 2023 open letter that the claims driving withdrawals were "false" and that "ERIC has never been used to register voters of one party over another."

Simultaneous with the private briefings on ELLY, the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security moved to formalize a data-sharing deal. CBS News reported on March 26, 2026, that the two agencies were close to finalizing an agreement to funnel voter registration data collected from states by DOJ's Civil Rights Division to DHS, where it would be run through the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) system, a citizenship lookup program originally designed to check government benefit eligibility.

The Civil Rights Division's attorneys did not disclose this plan to courts hearing DOJ's lawsuits demanding state voter data. A DOJ attorney, Eric Neff, first publicly acknowledged the plan only after CBS News sought comment, during a March 2026 court hearing in Rhode Island. U.S. District Judge David Carter in California wrote that "the Court does not take lightly DOJ's obfuscation of its true motives" in the voter roll litigation.

By May 2026, at least 25 states had run 67 million voter registrations through the expanded SAVE system since April 2025, including 7.4 million registrations from North Carolina recently added to the count. USCIS said the checks identified roughly 24,000 potential noncitizens and approximately 350,000 potentially deceased registrants. Independent investigations found SAVE was misidentifying U.S. citizens as noncitizens at rates that varied widely by county.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that more than 5% of voters SAVE identified as noncitizens in counties that cross-checked results against state driver's license records actually proved to be citizens. In St. Louis County, Missouri, SAVE's initial list of 691 flagged voters shrank to 133 after cross-referencing with passport data, meaning at least 81% of the original results were incorrect. DHS has had to correct information provided to at least five states after SAVE misidentified voters.

SAVE's errors stem from structural problems with the data it uses. The program was built to check benefits eligibility one query at a time, not to conduct bulk scans of millions of voter registrations simultaneously. When citizenship is acquired automatically, as when a child born abroad acquires it through a parent's naturalization, the event often doesn't generate a record in the immigration databases SAVE queries. Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats alike, sent a letter to the state's legislative leaders warning that SAVE was repeatedly flagging "individuals we know to be US citizens, our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies."

Even at 98% accuracy across 67 million registrations, the math produces roughly 1.34 million incorrect flags. Some states, including Ohio, require local election boards to "promptly" cancel registrations the secretary of state identifies as noncitizens, meaning a flagged voter may be removed before they can respond.

The Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a, requires federal agencies to publish a System of Records Notice in the Federal Register before collecting, using, or sharing personally identifiable information for a new purpose, and to allow public comment. DOJ has not published any such notice covering its collection of state voter rolls or its plan to transfer that data to DHS — an omission civil liberties advocates say violates the statute regardless of whether DOJ wins its court cases demanding the data.

DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to provide unredacted voter rolls, including Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers, to the Civil Rights Division. Eight district courts have dismissed the suits on the merits — in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Maine — with several judges finding DOJ's stated rationale pretextual. A ninth court dismissed the Georgia suit for filing in the wrong venue; DOJ refiled. Oklahoma settled, agreeing to provide its voter data in exchange for dismissal.

Senator Maria Cantwell sent a letter to DOJ demanding it cease what she called a "pressure campaign" against states to obtain sensitive voter data. Voting rights groups have filed at least six separate federal lawsuits challenging SAVE-based voter checks. The Brennan Center for Justice tracks the litigation in detail.

A photo obtained by the Campaign Legal Center and first reported by ProPublica placed Richards Jr. at a private dinner during the February 2026 Washington summit alongside Cleta Mitchell and two DHS political appointees: Heather Honey, focused on election integrity, and Marci McCarthy, the public affairs director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. McCarthy captioned the photo "Grateful for the friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction" before the image was taken offline.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said: "When election officials devote taxpayer-funded time and resources to evaluating voter purgeVoter PurgeThe removal of names from voter rolls, often justified as list maintenance but sometimes used to eliminate eligible voters.Key ConceptVoter PurgeThe removal of names from voter rolls, often justified as list maintenance but sometimes used to eliminate eligible voters.Open conceptBookmark tools like ELLY or Psephos, products promoted by Rick Richards, who is closely aligned with well-known election deniers, alarm bells should sound."