Thousands of voter challenges rejected in Georgia over faulty data

A Georgia county election board rejected a wave of voter challenges filed under the state's new election law.

The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration dismissed an attempt Saturday to cancel the registrations of 2,472 voters challenged by local conservative activist Eugene Williams using software from the Republican-backed company EagleAI to identify voters who may have moved, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Williams has previously challenged thousands of registrations using the database to find voters without an identifiable address, and the state's Republican legislature passed a new law that went into effect July 1 to give private citizens even more power to challenge voter eligibility.

The new law upholds challenges if evidence shows a voter has died or moved, registers in a new jurisdiction, or is registered at a nonresidential address, and it's one of several laws passed by Republican legislators after Donald Trump claimed fraud cost him re-election in 2020, although numerous investigations have found no proof of those claims.

Another election law passed a year after Trump's loss allows activists like Williams to challenge an unlimited number of voters who appear to have moved, and conservatives have filed more than 350,000 challenges since Trump lost, although county election boards have rejected the vast majority of those.

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EagleAI, which is enthusiastically endorsed by election denier Cleta Mitchell, has marketed its software to state and local governments as a system for clearing potentially ineligible voters from the rolls. Voting rights activists say the database is unreliable and could be used to cancel the registrations of eligible voters.

The Cobb election board voted 4-1 to dismiss all but four challenges, with only GOP-appointed board member Debbie Fisher standing in opposition, and board members cited errors in the data sourced from EagleAI and other third-party vendors.

The four registrations that were canceled were removed before the hearing, and 88 others flagged by Williams were already scheduled to be removed by routine maintenance.