The creators of a controversial program designed to hunt for voter fraud that was promoted by conservative activists are pitching two new programs to state election officials ahead of the midterms.
The first election software from Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. and his son, John W. Richards III, called EagleAI, promised to help officials and activists root out inaccurate voter registrations in the run-up to the 2024 election. The program was embraced by members of the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by Cleta Mitchell, a former election lawyer for President Donald Trump. But it was also criticized as inaccurate by election officials and experts, as well as some of the activists who tried it.
Now, the father-son duo is back with two new programs: ELLY and Psephos. They have pitched election officials in Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island, according to email correspondence and pitch materials obtained through Freedom of Information requests made by the nonpartisan government watchdog American Oversight and shared with NBC News.
Richards Jr., a medical doctor, also presented ELLY at an “Election Integrity Summit” last month in Washington, D.C., according to attendees who spoke publicly about the closed-media event.
And on Wednesday, Richards III said both programs will be presented to the Georgia State Election Board, Richards III said, where Trump allies have a majority. Richards III and his father declined to speak further with NBC News before the meeting.
According to promotional materials shared with election officials, the ELLY and Psephos programs are similar to EagleAI (pronounced “eagle eye”). All three programs aggregate public records like obituaries, U.S. Postal Service data, property tax information or maps from Google to help users cross-reference the data with voter registrations.
ELLY is being marketed to county officials and headed up by Richards Jr., while Psephos is geared to state-level officials and led by Richards III, according to promotional materials in the emails with state government officials.
In the wake of Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, a cottage industry of activist groups and programs has sprung up, organizing physical or digital canvasses to try to check election results and voter rolls.
America’s voter rolls are largely built for registration, not removal, and election officials do struggle to keep them up to date. But mass challenges often create huge workloads with little payoff, since many of the challenged voters remain on the rolls and aren’t deemed ineligible. What’s more, there’s no evidence that voter fraud is widespread.
“Election integrity demands reliable tools to safeguard sensitive voter information yet platforms like ELLY and Psephos fall short, relying on outdated data lags, high false positive rates from probabilistic matching, privacy and legal compliance risks, and unvalidated accuracy claims that threaten eligible voters’ rights,” Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.
ELLY, the county-focused program, will rely entirely on public records, while Psephos plans to incorporate more government and commercial data along with public records, according to materials Richards III shared with election officials. They could run into the same problems as EagleAI. Publicly available data is less reliable than the personal, protected information government entities have and use for to maintain voter rolls, like Social Security and driver’s license numbers.
“Even names and birthday[s] or birth date[s] result in huge numbers of false positives, far more false positives than true positives. And so in order to get quality data, you need to have the sensitive information,” said David Becker, who helped a group of states build the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
ERIC is an interstate partnership that uses sophisticated technology to share encoded data to help states update their voter rolls when people move or die in other states. Becker, who now runs the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, which seeks to boost trust in elections, said ERIC didn’t use public data because it was clear the rate of false positives would be too high.
ERIC was a little-known tool for helping states make their voter rolls more accurate, before Mitchell and conservative activists began to lobby against it after a conservative website falsely claimed the system was helping Democrats and inflating the voter rolls. A spate of states have since left the partnership.
A promotional document for ELLY said volunteers would be made available to help officials administer the program. The document doesn’t indicate who those volunteers will be. In 2023, Richards Jr. spent months training activists from Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network.
“ELLY can also make approved data available to a curated group of volunteers who are trained to review voter registrations in the context of federal and state laws,” the document read. “This volunteer-supported service is provided as a courtesy, with no cost to counties, making it a cost-effective supplement to existing processes in resource strapped offices.”
Before Wednesday’s public meeting of the Georgia State Election Board, Richards Jr. and his son have privately pitched officials in other states on the programs.
According to emails and Zoom records obtained by American Oversight, the two met with Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskin’s chief of staff, Matthew Alsager, last year.
“Our chief heard the presentation, nothing substantial and no further action,” Hoskins’ director of communications, Rachael Dunn, said in an email.
Richards III discussed Psephos with Kathy Placencia, the state director of elections in Rhode Island, according to an email she wrote, while Richards Jr. pitched a staffer at the North Carolina State Board of Elections on ELLY, as first reported by NC Newsline.
The election officials in Rhode Island and North Carolina who were pitched didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In February, Richards Jr. briefed election activists on ELLY at a Washington, D.C., summit convened by Michael Flynn, a former Trump national security adviser and prominent advocate of election conspiracy theories.
“We had a briefing on a data system that’s just phenomenal,” Flynn said in an interview with Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist in Britain and a convicted criminal whom the Trump administration hosted at the State Department the following week. “ELLY, it’s called.”
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who was a major funder in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, spoke about ELLY in an interview on LindellTV, run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, after the summit. He called it the “alternative to ERIC,” adding that “it’s available for activists within their own states, and your own states can be using it.”
A photo posted online and first reported by ProPublica pictures Richards Jr. dining with Mitchell and two Department of Homeland Security officials — Heather Honey, a political appointee focused on election integrity, and Marci McCarthy, the public affairs director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
It’s unclear what was discussed, but it’s clear the group’s work brought them together.
“Grateful for the friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction. The mission continues…and so does the fellowship,” McCarthy wrote as a caption to the photo, which has been taken offline but was shared with NBC News by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
Kris Jurski, a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories and built his own voter roll review program called “The People’s Audit,” is also in the photo.
Jurski said in social media posts that he helped build ELLY and has been promoting it to activist groups and on social media. Last week, he posted a screen recording on Telegram of ELLY, with a user clicking through various state voter rolls.
The video suggests the program had incomplete data: 94% of New Jersey voter registrations and 100% of Washington, D.C., registrations are flagged as “incomplete data or error.”
“The most extensive voter roll analysis tool in the country doesn’t just build itself,” Jurski wrote below the video.
As for EagleAI, it’s unclear whether the program is still being used. The only known county or state to sign on to use it, Columbia County, Georgia, ended its contract last March.
Nancy Gay, the executive director of the county’s board of elections, said in an interview that her office never actually used the program after it initially struggled to log in.
“We were coming up on a year anniversary, and we hadn’t had time to train on it or use it,” Gay said.
She said that the contract was “mutually” terminated and that Richards Jr. hadn’t been in touch since.
