A New Antidemocracy Tool:
Don't let the "AI" in the name fool you. There's nothing intelligent about EagleAI, which appears to be no more than a system that performs data matches based on a database of public voter data amassed by a web scraper. Its own proponents describe it as "Excel on steroids." [...]
EagleAI takes from sources including the National Change of Address database, criminal justice records, and tax property data to create massive lists of voters. From there, it highlights names of potentially ineligible voters using criteria that are at best unreliable and at worst irrelevant, such as matching names on voter lists with change-of-address forms or felony convictions, or even just registration at nursing homes (baselessly implying that nursing home residents are somehow not competent to vote). Amateur investigators take the highlighted names and look for purported evidence of voter ineligibility, like a social media posting from out of state. They can then use EagleAI to auto-prepare challenge forms in a couple of clicks. It's no more than a clearinghouse for election deniers to compile mass challenges.
EagleAI NETwork's founder, Dr. John W. "Rick" Richards Jr. [...] presented the software in March to the conservative Election Integrity Network, a group organized by attorney Cleta Mitchell, who took part in Trump's phone call in which he asked Georgia's secretary of state to "find" enough votes for him to win the state's electors in 2020.
During the presentation, Mitchell called the software "amazing" and said she wanted to "get a plan together" to share the platform with other groups and states that have withdrawn from ERIC.
"The left will hate this ... but we love it," Mitchell said at the meeting. [...]
The scrutiny of EagleAI NETwork comes after nine Republican-led states withdrew from the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC -- a once-obscure consortium that was founded a little more than a decade ago as a way for states to share government data to update voter registration rolls in an effort to prevent fraud. [...]
ERIC has been the target of criticism by Trump and conservative activists, who have cast it as swelling voter registration rolls because member states must send out information encouraging eligible residents to register to vote.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I wonder if a similar tool could be developed to catch landlords changing their address in off years to vote in special elections and the such.
I know people lie online all the time, but I saw plenty claiming they were going to siwtch their primary residency to vote in SF recalls
OTOH automated snitching is bad.
I'm retired & do a fair bit of traveling. Every time I go out of town for more than a month I have to file a temporary change of address to get my mail sent to a mail handling service located in a different state. So far that hasn't caused any voter registration issues, but I bet the Republican idiots running my state will be all over this piece of junk, so yay.
It would be pretty easy to "train the AI" to bin names by probable ethnicity and then use the results of that training to skew fraud claims.
And whats up with the latest round of products called yourNameAI ? Seems like deja vu from the 1990s eyourName followed soon thereafter by iyourName. Marketing, bah!
Given the issues with AI bias, it's "pretty easy" in the sense that it's hard not to include it! Of course, I can't imagine this group sees such bias as a bug.