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MAGAists want to throw Democrats off the Voter Rolls; Hope Springs battles to keep them registered [1]

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Date: 2023-12-06

October was a difficult month to keep everyone abreast of what Hope Springs from Field PAC had been doing — outside of our intense focus on GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And, to be honest, i needed a little recovery time after the election. So i am spending the week catching everyone up on things Hope Springs has been doing but haven’t brought to people’s attention.

Hope Springs from Field has three primary missions:

A. Early Voter Contact/Early Organizing

B. Special Elections

C. GOTV & Voter/Election Protection

These are clearly interrelated but we spend most of our focus here on knocking on doors because it is, save for the colder months, an ongoing activity. Voter/Election Protection is, as well — but only because of the ongoing assault on voters by Republicans and their MAGA supporters.

The hottest issue in election administration this year was whether states should join, leave or remain in ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. Resignations by 11 Republican-controlled states dropped ERIC membership from the 33 state (plus Washington, DC) coalition in 2022 to 22 states + D.C. after the Republican state’s resignations all take effect. ERIC

collects data from state sources, such as election boards and departments of motor vehicles, along with federal data on deaths and changes of address. It then produces reports for participating state election officials that they can use to update their voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, investigate rare cases of potentially illegal voting, and help eligible but unregistered Americans complete their voter registration. Currently, 28 states and Washington, DC, are members. To date, the group has helped states identify millions of registrants who should be taken off the rolls because they moved or died, and it has facilitated millions of new registrations of eligible voters. By using sophisticated matching technology and data from various federal and state sources, ERIC allows for more precise matching than what states can do on their own

Sounds beneficial, right? “It makes it easier to catch the rare instances of fraud.”

The problem ERIC addresses is that voter rolls are always in flux. Even though double voting is rare, improving voter list accuracy reduces the opportunity for double voting. But it is the second part of ERIC’s mission — to increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens — that has driven Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters insane. Joining ERIC includes a commitment to reach out to voters who are eligible but unregistered, and ERIC provides reports on who those people might be.

The need for clean voter rolls has not gone away. If anything, an interest in list maintenance generally is hotter than ever, as seen by the enactments relating to this over the last three years. Some recent enactments have mandated more frequent maintenance activities and required the use of the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address records along with in-state information, such as death records, prison records and jury lists. I discussed the errors we are finding with using the NCOA for this purpose yesterday. They are substantial, almost as bad as the expectation that infrequent voters will open up what is widely considered junk mail!

But none of that replaces the service ERIC provides to compare voter records across state lines, within each state and with Social Security Administration records.

Although ERIC requires outreach to all unregistered-but-eligible voters, former President Trump has accused it of “pump[ing] the rolls” for Democrats, and states like Ohio and Missouri have objected to this outreach as unnecessary. The far-right media also has painted the group’s origins as questionable because it was founded by state election officials with financial assistance from the Pew Foundation.

But that isn’t really the disturbing part. Voters seem to be getting used to the hysteria emanating from GOP elected officials, at least from what we learned this year knocking on doors in Ohio and Virginia (we didn’t actually get the same feedback in Pennsylvania), states that held off-off-year elections. The disturbing part is what Republicans and conservatives are touting to replace ERIC.

EagleAI (pronounced Eagle Eye) touts itself as a potential replacement for the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter registration information sharing organization that currently has 25 states as members, including Georgia. The bipartisan collaboration has been attacked by conservatives who believe it’s biased and ineffective. Nine Republican-led states have withdrawn from ERIC.

The big issue we have with EagleAI is that it has a public interface, one that will encourage voter challenges in states that allow it. According to the Atlanta Constitution Journal, “Under Georgia’s 2021 voting law, any voter can challenge an unlimited number of voters, forcing county election boards to hold hearings and decide on voters’ qualifications.” And our grassroots volunteers have written-up reports of Koch-sponsored AFP canvassers asking voters in their counties if they were willing to “sponsor” voter challenges, presumably provided to the willing voter by AFP. The first incident was the reason i started reporting each week on whether our volunteers saw any evidence of conservative orgs’ out there knocking on doors in their area.

“EagleAI NETwork™ is a tool where citizens concerned with this issue can log in, see the data, easily review the data against publicly available data, and with a click, send the data to their local election officials.”

The one advantage Hope Springs from Field has in this area is our on-going to get voters who need them their free Voter Photo IDs. So organizers have developed good relationships with elections offices as we warn them about the days we schedule these well in advance and consult with them about whether they have the inventory to support the number of voters we are looking to bring in for their free Voter Photo IDs. Because we have developed this repour, we’ve been able to get head’s up when someone has challenged mass voter registrations in the Black Belt counties — except for Coffee County, that has been resistant to our efforts.

Just so i am clear: we aren’t waiting for voters to ask for help when their voter registration is challenged. Just like when we learn someone’s ballot has been rejected, we are seeking voters out to help them navigate the process. This is just part of our “super-compliance” efforts in our Early Organizing.

But the threat to Democracy is real.

Activists are currently testing a computer program called EagleAI NETwork, a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promises to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other sources. The activists then personally evaluate the flagged voter registrations one by one — looking up home addresses on Google Maps, searching for obituaries online — and prepare lists of questionable registrations to report to local officials. It’s the latest in a growing trend of voter fraud vigilantism, as activists seek to insert themselves into routine election administration processes looking to uncover problems and find proof of voter fraud. And while a handful of individuals in Georgia and Texas have taken in recent years to filing mass voter challenges, EagleAI could turn that steady stream into a nationwide flood. For several months, activists around the country, organized in part by influential Trump ally Cleta Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network she founded, have been learning to use the program in Zoom trainings and organizing into state-specific teams in preparation for its launch, according to recordings of software demonstrations and activist meetings seen by NBC News. Some Georgia users began testing the software this summer, the meetings reveal, while Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Texas are slated to follow.

Note that we have been canvassing in every state but Texas. In North Carolina, we had been able to retrieve a list of voters challenged by one person and made various efforts to contact these Africam-American voters and help them resolve their voter registration to the Board of Election's satisfaction. This incident actually prompted someone (not the person we were told was making the challenges) to threaten physical harm to myself. Not that anything actually happened. But:

Election experts and voting rights advocates warn that an activist-led strategy risks overwhelming election workers with reports of problem registrations generated by amateurs using unreliable data. And those reports may, in turn, intimidate voters or require them to jump through hoops to maintain their voting rights.

Last year, at least 92,000 voters’ eligibility was called into question. Not all of these have been in counties we have been canvassing or have been trying to help voters obtain free Voter Photo IDs. The majority were rejected, we simply don’t know if voters (especially minorities and young people) will actually do the worked needed to preserve their voting rights. Challenged voters have to actually physically go to the Elections Office to prove they are who they are and that they’re entitled to vote. Hope Springs existing Voter/Election Protection efforts has been able to support their efforts to protect their Right to Vote, something that has been aided by the fact that we are already canvassing in their county, working to get voters their free Voter Photo IDs, collecting Incident Reports and helping Black Churches register voters in their congregations (and file Incident Reports, if needed). Walking with Constituent Service Request Forms doesn’t hurt, either.

Hope Springs from Field employs a rather traditional approach to GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote), including election protection. That’s because we are a grassroots (in-person) voter-contact project attempting to reinstall “old fashioned” voter contact before Covid. 2020 was a year where Republicans rapidly advanced and Democrats regressed in the area of voter contact, especially in the area of Election Protection. 2024 will be different, and, as we have demonstrated in Georgia and Ohio, we learned from GOP advancements in the area of voter removal and suppression. Which is why returning to old-school voter contact is so important to continue (and not a replacement for the other areas of voter identification, motivation and mobilization).

Like everyone else, we are asking for your financial support for these vital efforts. If you are like me, you are inundated with requests. We don’t have any cute pets, or special treats, to offer up to encourage your support. Nor will we try to guilt you by telling you the threat is real, ongoing and getting more sophisticated. We are all getting tired of it.

But if you are able to contribute to our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please do. We need your help:

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/hopevoteprotect

You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/6/2209980/-MAGAists-want-to-throw-Democrats-off-the-Voter-Rolls-Hope-Springs-battles-to-keep-them-registered?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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