A group in North Carolina with more than 2,000 members is compiling lists of so-called “suspicious voters” in their state with the intent of challenging their votes en masse on Election Day and the days following. The technology comes from EagleAI Network, a company that helps identify potential targets of voter challenges and facilitate the filings.

According to weekly emails sent to members of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team and reviewed by WIRED, the group has used EagleAI Network since at least August to develop “Suspicious Voters Lists.”

These so-called “suspicious” voters could be people who made clerical errors on their voter registrations, like misspelling a street name; people whose personal information differs between EagleAI Network’s different databases, like a two different home addresses if someone recently moved; or people who died but haven’t been removed from EagleAI Network’s most recent voter rolls. Challengers assume these errors are not routine discrepancies, but evidence of systematic voter fraud and a shadowy plot to foil the presidential election.

An email from October 28 lists grounds to challenge a voter or “investigate further.” Voters to challenge, it says, include same-day registrants, US service members overseas, or people with homestead exemptions, a home tax exemption for vulnerable individuals, such as elderly or disabled people, in cases where there are anomalies with their registration or address. Meanwhile, the email says people who merit further investigation include those who voted from a college dorm, people who registered from a P.O. Box, and people with “inactive” voter status.

“We continue to work on developing ‘Suspicious Registrant Lists’ for each county to use in monitoring (and possibly challenging) illegal voting,” two emails sent in October read. “We are still working on scripts and methods to automate the process of updating and transmitting the lists.”

Several emails explicitly mention EagleAI Network’s role in this effort. In one portion of the weekly meetings, the agendas mention a “Status Update” on what’s described alternatingly as “Eagle AI [sic] & Generating Suspicious Voters Lists” and “Eagle AI & NC Voter List Maintenance.” One September email says this update would include a “Debrief from 8:30PM call on Monday night with Dr. Richards,” referring to John W. Richards Jr., the CEO of EagleAI Network.

In response to a request for comment, Richards tells WIRED that EagleAI Network “has no relationships with entities” and, rather, “is used by individuals.”

“We do not ask people whether they work with groups,” Richards says.

The NCEIT is affiliated with the nationwide Election Integrity Network (EIN), whose members allege without evidence that the US is plagued with voter fraud. The EIN was created by Cleta Mitchell, Donald Trump’s former lawyer who was present on the 2020 phone call in which Trump asked the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him nearly 12,000 votes.

When EagleAI Network was created in the wake of the 2020 election, it reportedly received legal assistance and strategy advice from Mitchell—though Richards has insisted that Mitchell has no “official relationship” with EagleAI Network. The company has courted contracts with public election boards in at least three states (Georgia, Texas, and West Virginia), and it has data about voters that have recently moved from at least nine states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas), but the total number of states EagleAI Network has been used in is unclear. Notably, North Carolina is absent from both publicly available lists.

The NCEIT’s campaign to target “suspicious voters” could disproportionately impact Hispanic people. Jim Womack, NCEIT founder and president and Lee County Republican Party chair, said in a recent video obtained by CBS News that when generating suspicious voter lists, NCEIT members should target people with “Hispanic-sounding” last names.

“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” Womack says in the video. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”

The emails don’t detail exactly how the “suspicious voter” tool from EagleAI Network works. However, the company’s tool for automating voter registration challenges, a similar process, are well-documented. While voter registration challenges have to be filed no fewer than 90 days before an election, voter challenges can be filed up to five days after an election in North Carolina.

EagleAI Network’s tool for filing voter registration challenges essentially centralizes the process. It allows users to search for people who they suspect have issues or mistakes in their voter registrations, using data from a combination of public and private sources. A search could surface voters who, say, live at a particular address, or share demographics like age.

A user can then select one or even many of those voters at once, and the tool automatically fills out voter registration challenges. According to training videos obtained by The Guardian, the forms are often pre-filled with the information of a different person, a proxy who would file the challenge.

EagleAI Network assigns each challenge to someone in the same county as the voter in order to comply with Georgia state law. But Georgia election officials say that this system is still in violation of state law, because the person filing the challenge is supposed to do all of the work in the process, not just the last step.

Georgia county election officials told The Guardian in February that almost all of the challenges filed through EagleAI Network have been quickly dismissed because they contained incorrect or out-of-date information. However, they say that the challenges still overwhelm their offices and grind other important work to a halt.

The NCEIT had been using EagleAI Network’s voter registration challenge tool for many months before the suspicious voter lists were first mentioned. EagleAI Network’s tool for “voter list maintenance” has been mentioned weekly since February, the earliest of the emails obtained by WIRED. It’s unclear how many voter registration challenges in North Carolina may have already been facilitated by people using technology from EagleAI Network facilitated.

The October 28 email details some steps that people should take when compiling “suspicious voters” and creating voter challenges. It tells people to “Flag Suspicious Voters then Research,” and then submit the challenge with “relevant documentation.” It then instructs them to file the challenge “using a voter from the same county” before November 10. The email also refers to voter challenges planned to be filed on Election Day itself.

“Election Day Challenges MUST be incontrovertible — i.e., clear and compelling evidence the person is casting a fraudulent ballot, other than a provisional ballot,” it reads.

If the NCEIT successfully uses EagleAI Network to file mass voter challenges Election Day and the days following, it could sow further chaos and disruption in an election cycle that has already been plagued with violence. Election workers have been preparing for more violence on November 5, with some installing bulletproof and building barriers meant to distance themselves from potential car bombs.

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