The swing state of Georgia may be one of the most important elections to help curtail President Donald Trump’s congressional power next year. But in the lead-up to the November midterms, Zeteo reports the state’s Republican-dominated election board is laboring hard to blow the results.
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One of their methods apparently involves Republicans’ effort to install buggy new software to challenge voters’ registration.
“Recently, the State Election Board has … undertaken the unprecedented move of directly challenging the voter registration of 220 voters in Chatham County, home to Savannah and another largely Democratic bloc of voters,” reports Zeteo writer Justin Glawe. “The board utilized a software program called ‘ELLY’ to identify the voters. ELLY is the brainchild of Dr. Rick Richards, a hardcore election denier who was previously behind the EagleAI program that sought to use public databases to identify voters who may have been ineligible to vote based on address changes.”
ELLY is big-time flawed, says Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover. In early June, the State Board asked Dover to test ELLY’s ability to flag ineligible voters, and after only a short time, Dover told Zeteo she found too many false positives to continue.
“One of my board members’ wives was on the obituary list and she is very much alive,” Dover said, referring to a June 8 search for voter info on her own employees. It was during that maiden voyage that ELLY flagged the wife of a Cherokee County elections board member as dead.
But then Dover used ELLY to look up her own voting history, as well as that of her husband.
“My spouse’s record – it showed him voting early and on Election Day in the same election,” said Dover, describing what would have been a crime — had it been true. Dover said her husband did not vote twice in the same election.
Additionally, Dover said ELLY delivered incorrect information about her own voting history: ““It showed me voting in person on Election Day, but I voted by mail. When I saw as many errors as I saw, I did not go any further with it.”
But when she delivered ELLY’s garbage results to the state election board, Dover said board member Salleigh Grubbs dismissed the snafus as the result of “incorrect data from the secretary of state.”
Just to be clear, Zeteo reports Grubbs is the same Trump-aligned board member who became famous in election-denial circles for chasing down trucks she falsely believed contained shredded ballots in.
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However, the newly Trump-aligned Georgia State Election Board has also hired two new “investigators,” including election deniers Jason Frazier and Larry Duckworth. Their experience, say critics, is woefully lacking.
“Recently, Duckworth sat down with Dover and other election officials in Cherokee County to discuss a complaint that polling precincts had been consolidated. There was just one problem: No precincts had been consolidated,” reports Zeteo. Instead, the owners of the building said that it briefly could not serve as a polling location.
“He literally did not know the difference between a ‘polling location’ and a ‘precinct,’” Dover told Zeteo.
Zeteo adds that Duckworth is a whose Facebook page contains references to conspiracy theories about non-citizen voting and expressions of open support for Trump. “I stand with Trump,” reads a post on Duckworth’s page from March 2023.
In March 2024, Zeteo reports Duckworth shared a Fox story about a 2021 executive order from former President Joe Biden claiming Biden was “attempting to register” undocumented immigrants to vote.
“We Must Counter These Liberal Dishonesties To Destroy Elections By Citizens Only,” Duckworth wrote. “They hate normal America, because it sees through the lies. They need to have government dependent, failed people to support their power for power’s sake all-consuming passion. Dangerous!”
But when contacted by Zeteo, Duckworth initially said he had “not posted anything on Facebook about election matters,” before later defending his posts. Zeteo said Duckworth also claimed that his personal political beliefs play no role in his investigations.
“I am a very non-partisan guy doing these investigations,” said Duckworth. “They’re done very factually, very non-partisan, down the middle. I don’t have any bias one way or the other about what the facts are.”
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