A member of the Forsyth County, Georgia, election board challenged the eligibility of 69 voters this year, including four he said were dead. ProPublica reporters found all four alive. The data tool behind the list is now being offered to Republican candidates and poll monitors in more than 3,000 counties.
That is the part Black voters in Georgia should read twice. Mass challenges to voter rolls are an old weapon here. In 1946, gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge handed out challenge forms and urged supporters to “disqualify and mark off the voters’ list three-fourths of the Negro vote in this state,” as Ms. Magazine recounts. The Brennan Center for Justice counts roughly 364,000 voters challenged in Georgia after the 2020 election and about 65,000 more across at least eight counties in 2022. Only the software is new.
As ProPublica first reported, the tool is called ELLY’s Election Monitor. Rick Richards built it. It pulls together voter files, change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries and property websites to produce lists of “suspicious voters.” Max Clavijo, who sits on the Forsyth board and belongs to the Election Integrity Network, used that data for his challenges and questioned more than 22,000 other names on the roll. The network is led by Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who worked with Donald Trump on his effort to reverse the 2020 result.
The data did not hold up. ProPublica confirmed that the four people called dead were living, among them a night-shift nurse. Thirty-eight of the 69 challenged voters had simply registered under their initials instead of their full first names, which is legal. The tool has no Social Security numbers or full birth dates, so two different people can look like one.
The county’s own board turned the challenge back. Chair Barbara Luth said activists were bypassing the formal process. Republican member Joel Natt said challengers must bring “solid evidence through the proper channel.” That is the safeguard that worked in Forsyth. It depends on a board that checks, in a county with the staff to do it.
Richards said on private calls that he would provide data from more than 3,000 counties to GOP candidates and monitors. Forsyth’s board had the time and the will to check. Not every county board will.
The stakes are fresh. The Brennan Center reports that turnout in Georgia spiked among Black voters and dipped for white voters in this month’s midterms. A tool that mislabels living people as dead is not a neutral audit. It hands a century-old tactic to anyone with a laptop.
Georgia counties should require every challenge to come with documents, not a spreadsheet, and should tell the people on the list before it reaches a vote. Forsyth did. The next county may not.
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