Conservative activists are courting North Carolina elections officials, offering use of unproven software they say will find fraudulent voters.
Brian LiVecchi, chief of staff to state Elections Director Sam Hayes, agreed in email exchanges to witness the demonstration of a computer program called ELLY, developed by retired physician John W. “Rick” Richards.
Richards is the same Georgia resident who created the controversial voter registration matching software EAGLEAI (pronounced “eagle eye”) that conservative activists in that state used to file mass voter challenges in 2024.
Janet Fenstermaker, who as of last year was a board member of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told LiVecchi in a January email exchange that she had been “beta-testing” ELLY, and it would be offered free to the state and counties.
The North Carolina Election Integrity Team is a conservative group that hunts for voter fraud and is part of a network of members who are trained to use the third-party software. Fenstermaker did not identify herself as a NCEIT board member in her email.
“While it’s still a work in progress, I highly recommend it and believe you’ll find it useful,” she wrote.
LiVecchi responded, “We are always on the lookout for technologies or tools to leverage in the pursuit of accurate voter rolls, and as you know our current system was not designed with the identification and elimination of duplicate registrations as a top-line priority. While we have been doing the best we can with the tools available and have been developing tools of our own, we welcome input and assistance from the public where possible.”
The email correspondence between Fenstermaker and LiVecchi was obtained by American Oversight through a public records request. American Oversight, a left-leaning nonprofit that focuses on obtaining public records, shared the email exchange with NC Newsline.
In an interview with NC Newsline, Hayes and LiVecchi said they meet with anyone who has ideas on how to improve election administration.
For example, they said they’ve met with representatives from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and have spoken to a representative from the Brennan Center for Justice at a Washington, D.C., convention.
NC elections officials have already used some activist-recommended programs
Fenstermaker isn’t the first election integrity activist to recommend that state election officials use untested computer programs to find duplicate registrations.
A few years ago, Carol Snow, a conservative activist who has described herself as an “election denier,” came to the elections board claiming to have found duplicate registrations that allowed people to vote twice. The elections board, which then had a Democratic majority, rejected Snow’s complaint, with its then-counsel saying that her examples were the result of poll worker misspellings, a father and son with the same name voting, or twins voting.
Snow appears to have received a warmer reception from the board’s new Republican leadership.. LiVecchi said elections officials have already used tools she recommended and have found some duplicate registrations.
“Any tool that helps us have more accurate rolls is useful. It remains to be seen if this is going to be one of them,” LiVecchi said of ELLY.
American Oversight told NC Newsline that using hobbyists’ computer programs to check voter registrations is reckless.
“When election officials meet with purveyors of voter purge tools like EagleAI or ELLY, we should be very worried,” Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight, said in an email. “Platforms like these are built on unreliable and often outdated datasets that generate false positives — sweeping in many Americans who are fully qualified to vote and compromising their ability to participate in our democracy.
“It’s deeply troubling that anyone would consider positioning these tools alongside or as alternatives to trusted voter roll maintenance practices used by professionals,” Chukwu said. “When election officials give these fundamentally flawed systems legitimacy by hosting meetings or considering adoption, they risk undermining public confidence, burdening election offices with needless investigations, and ultimately discouraging Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. Perhaps that has been their objective all along.”
Fenstermaker did not respond to NC Newsline’s interview request. Richards told Newsline he no longer talks to reporters.
Conservatives downplay criticism of third-party software to check voter records
Richards’ product EAGLEAI has made national news a few years ago as the fraud-hunting software that Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network promoted.
Mitchell, a former lawyer for President Donald Trump, was on the 2021 phone call during which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in that state.
Critics of EAGLEAI called the computer program unreliable because it relies on out-of-date sources or information that can be easily misinterpreted.
In a letter to Columbia County, Ga. elections officials who licensed the EAGLEAI software in 2023, the Brennan Center for Justice said the public information the program relies on, which is scraped from the U.S. Postal Service’s national change of address database, property records and criminal justice records, is “insufficient to determine whether someone is still eligible to vote at their place of registration.”
It’s unclear how ELLY differs from EAGLEAI. But Jim Womack, head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, the state chapter of Mitchell’s group, vouched for the newer program, saying ELLY was derived from EAGLEAI and includes “modifications and enhancements.”
ELLY users helped identify voters who registered using the address of a mail-forwarding company in Sanford, Womack said in an interview.
The state Board of Elections has amplified its efforts to update voter registration records in the last six months. For example, it has a Registration Repair project that requires voters to submit government ID numbers that may be missing from their registrations.
Womack supports those efforts, and says the state could do more if it wasn’t limited by national laws.
“The problem they have is, there are restrictions and constraints in what you can do to eliminate people from the list,” he said.
Federal voting rights laws specify how and when registered voters can be removed from the rolls.
Womack identified the lag time between the out-of-state death of a resident and their removal from the state’s voter registration list as a problem for quickly updating voter rolls.
A multistate effort to improve voter rolls, called ERIC, could address that issue. It uses Social Security death data to identify registered voters who have died. But after ERIC became the target of far-right attacks, the North Carolina legislature prohibited the state from joining.
Tyler Daye, program manager for voting rights advocacy group Common Cause NC, said he’s concerned about false claims of voter ineligibility and activists misinterpreting what they find using third-party computer programs that could generate large quantites of errors.
“I think we already have a pretty robust process in North Carolina when it comes to list maintenance in order to ensure that only eligible voters vote,” Daye said.
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