The Plan to Use AI to Purge Voter Rolls

0:04Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hello. And Jason Kebler. hello uh on this election day my landlord has decided to have someone grind the driveway outside so i apologize in advance but i guess i don't know it's sufficiently chaotic and hopefully you won't be able to hear it too much but i apologize in advance for that that's his god-given right to you know dig up your driveway during a podcast in a democracy we allow that we uh we enjoy that but yes we'll see what we can do speaking of elections the first story we have is one exactly about that we wanted to publish it on this day and the story is inside the plan to use ai to purge voter rolls yes we did it we found an ai angle for an election day story People didn't think it could be done.

1:34We were able to do it. So Jason, first of all, because there's a lot of moving parts here, it's pretty complicated. Let's just start super basic. What is Eagle AI exactly? I guess maybe to preface this about finding the AI angle, there is dispute as to whether this is actually AI. Like many other AI startups, this is something that has appended AI to its name. and called itself AI, but it is unclear whether I would call it artificial intelligence. It's basically like a sophisticated database program that was created in the aftermath of the 2020 election. There have been many groups spun up to essentially disenfranchise voters.

2:26and one of the tactics is to challenge the eligibility of voters all over the country. And this is like, to be clear, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud or widespread people voting twice, things like that. Like if people vote twice, they're often caught. And some of the few cases where I have seen that it has been like Trump supporters voting twice and getting arrested, things like that. But basically, it's a Georgia organization that created this software that uses national address change information. It uses newspaper obituaries. It uses felony arrest record databases and a whole bunch of other stuff, like property records, things like that.

3:21And it combines all of that into a search tool that allows people to automate the system of challenging voter eligibility, which is maybe a little bit complicated. But the way that it works... Every state has different rules. But the way that it works in Georgia, which is where this article focuses on, is there is like a secretary of state maintained voter role, like all the registered voters. That is made publicly available. Then what Eagle AI does is it ingests this gigantic role of eligible voters and it runs it, it like cross runs it with all these other databases and tries to detect people that it thinks are ineligible to vote.

4:10and then somebody using this piece of software could then say oh look you had a bunch of voters who shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to vote or they're dead or whatever and it's as you say it's almost like a data broker in some ways right combining all these different data sets and coming to uh i'll say a conclusion i don't know how strong that conclusion is going to be but They're basically trying to streamline that process of calling out potential voter fraud, I guess, right? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. And it has so much in common with data broker, the way that these things are sort of like cross-pollinated and collated and so on and so forth.

4:51And a lot of the information is actually purchased from data brokers in some cases. Some of it is government data, but it's also like information scraped from the web, bought from data brokers, so on and so forth. And the interesting thing is like, theoretically, you want to make it very easy to register to vote and to vote in the United States. We know that because of various voter suppression tactics all over the country, but predominantly in the South especially, it has become very contentious as to who is allowed to vote. You have Elon Musk saying all these illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, although he's not using that term undocumented, are voting, things like that.

5:39And that is not actually happening. But there is this widespread perception that all of these people are voting who should not be voting. And the quote unquote evidence that is being used in many cases are typos in voter registration information. And one thing that is mentioned in this audio that I obtained is that in Georgia, a lot of the voter registration, like if you live in an apartment, some of the addresses will say like apartment one. And then the other ones will say like apartment hashtag one. And it's like very simple things like this, where there's like, you know, the number sign in the address.

6:23And they'll say, well, like that doesn't correlate with the person's government ID. There's no like hashtag in the address here. Like, let's challenge that. And so what Eagle AI is doing is making it very, very simple to generate these challenges in huge numbers. Like streamlines it, basically. It streamlines it, but also what it purports to do is like, in Georgia, they have a challenge system where anyone can challenge the legitimacy of any other voter. And so what happens is you have these groups that create these challenges and submit them to different election boards of each individual county.

7:01And so you'll have like one person filing 10 ,000 of them or like 80 ,000 of them. And there have been a few cases in Georgia where one person is filing tens of thousands of voter challenges collated from either Eagle AI or like other similar products that have been created over the last few years. And then like the Board of Elections has to go and determine whether these challenges are legitimate or not. And the really interesting thing in this case is that Eagle AI is in some cases being used to generate these challenges with one click, like, you know, click challenge. And then there is a county in Georgia that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 that like entered into a contract with Eagle AI to then use Eagle AI to review the challenges.

7:54So the scary thing here is that you could have these challenges being generated using information that is almost always faulty in some way. And then the government entity checking it is using that same software to check whether it's valid or not. Right. I mean, that's a mess. And even though I don't know much about this specific tool beyond your reporting, I know that the data coming out of data brokers is not always accurate and it can be a mess. And, you know, that's not ideal. Yeah. And to be clear, the Georgia Secretary of State, like the state, the guy in charge of all of the elections in Georgia, told the counties, do not use this software.

8:40Specifically, they said, don't use Eagle AI because we don't think that its data is accurate. it. And, you know, there was this county in Georgia that was considering using it. And ultimately, they ended up not using it in this election because, you know, it's a busy year, obviously, like there's a lot going on. And they basically said, like, we didn't have time to get trained on how to use this. But that doesn't mean Eagle AI wasn't used across the country to formulate these challenges. Caroline Haskins, who we used to work with at Motherboard, has done some reporting on this and actually like an hour ago published another story on Eagle AI saying that it's been used by private citizens in North Carolina to create like huge numbers of voter challenges.

9:32And so we do know that this is being used right now. Yeah, totally. And you mentioned audio and we'll get to that in a second. And before we do that, who actually made Eagle AI? We've spoken about who uses it, and that can be counties and then private citizens as well. But who made this tool exactly? So it's a guy named Dr. Rick Richards, who is a Columbia County resident, which is one of the reasons why they're like, oh, he lives nearby, let's use it. He's an epidemiologist. I don't know that much about him and I didn't focus on him that much in the article because a lot of the previous reporting on Eagle AI has been about how the tool was made and who this person is.

10:17But he's part of like a larger effort to, I guess, cast aspersions on American voting lists. There has been this really big push to politicize voter rolls and who is on it. And I will promise I'll keep this short. I won't get into it that much. But there was an organization called ERIC, like E-R-I-C, which is still a nonpartisan group that basically updates voter roles across the country and states opt into using it. And it is a group that if you move from Georgia to Texas or Georgia to Maryland or whatever, like they help update that information on the back end for secretaries of state. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republicans started saying like, this is a democratic psyop more or less, and have run a big campaign against Eric saying that it's somehow biased in some way.

11:22And as a result of that, a lot of states have started pulling out of using Eric. They have been successful at politicizing it to the point that this is not used that much in that many states. And the thing that is replacing it, or at least the thing that people are positioning as a thing to replace it is Eagle AI, which takes some of the information that Eric had, like the change of address information, things like that. But they're also adding all of these other pretty scary data sets into it and very often inaccurate data sets. There were also a lot of... In the meetings that I listened to, there was discussion of a lot of voters living at a single address, for example.

12:13And by a lot, I mean like five. And it's like there are many places in the United States where more than five 18-year-olds who can vote live in the same house. Like that's common. Another thing is Eagle AI was like detecting anyone who lived at a nursing home as being suspicious is not the right word, but being flagged in some way. Just because they're under the same roof, right? Just because they're under the same roof. And it's like, well, yeah, like hundreds of people can live at a nursing home and they are probably mostly eligible to vote, like things like that. And so there has been like a long history of people being flagged and removed from voter rolls inappropriately because of some clerical error or because of some challenge that had to do with, well, they showed up on some list somewhere or they have a very common name and there was a death notice for someone with that name, but there was actually two people who had the same birthday and the same, you know, name and one of them died.

13:16Something like that. Like that stuff happens often. And many like voter rights groups are saying like, we need to have like a really robust voter list because if you don't, you're gonna purge people who think that they're registered to vote and are registered to vote and should be allowed to vote, but can't because they've been removed from the list either accidentally or as a result of like a, you know, concerted effort to trim the voter lists. Right. Like one of these malicious or potentially malicious requests that could be powered by something like Eagle AI. So you mentioned some audio you got on some meetings.

13:58We will listen to a short clip in a minute, but just broadly, what is this audio of and how did you get it exactly? Because it's sort of, that's the basis of this article. Yeah, so I knew that the Board of Elections in Columbia County was considering this. And a lot of counties make audio available just like on their websites of meetings. And usually they make video available, to be honest. But Columbia County didn't make that available for some reason. So I requested video of these meetings. And they said, oh, we don't have any video. But like, were required by law to record it in some way. So they've been recording it on a cell phone for like a year.

14:45Just these really important meetings on some person's phone. And they just do the voice memos app on their iPhone and put it on the table. I mean, I think that's what's happening. Yeah. And it is really important. Like I listened to it and there are many residents there who are like, don't do this. This is really bad. It's like, you know, people from nonprofits show up and say like, this is bad for the following reasons, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, I think being on a board of elections is probably a very thankless, I don't even know if they're paid job. If they are paid, it's probably very little money.

15:23And it's like really contentious, unfortunately, in the United States now. And all that being said, it's like the three people on the election board in Columbia County, they, I don't know exactly who they're voting for, what their politics are. And they, they sort of like have the air of like, Hey, yeah, we want to make sure that there's a good election. But at the same time, each of them were repeating these sort of talking points from Eagle AI about there being dead people on the voter rolls, about there being people who shouldn't have voted that did vote in 2020, like things like that. And so some of the audio that that will play here is just members of the board talking about, as I see it, kind of repeating talking points that are popular among the Stop the Steal folks, and then talking kind of like callously about how Eagle AI can be used to like, quote unquote, research voters without them knowing, which I think is also pretty concerning.

16:32Yeah, for sure. All right, let's listen to some of that audio now, just a minute or so, to give you an idea of what this article is based on. I think there's been some misunderstanding. I saw some comments that basically are not true, that said that the software will change things in the voter rolls or that it will disenfranchise people or it will cause people to feel that they're being singled out. Well, first of all, they won't know they're being researched because they're going to be researched because something triggers the research. A death notice, a record in the National Change of Address database, something of that nature.

17:16If you can look at a timeline of the way we handle confirming whether voters are still eligible. Nothing will change in the steps that we take. The only thing in the little segment that is research to reach the point where you decide what you need to do, Eagle AI would be inserted there as a tool to help with the research. So, Jason, what does this audio overall show us? I mean, of course, how many was it? Is it hours of audio you got? I got like 12 or 13 hours of audio because it was like 12 meetings over the last year. I would say about two or three hours of that was talking about Eagle AI. And then a lot of the other stuff was just like regular, like, here's the polling place.

18:13You know, this county was hit by Hurricane Helene. And so they were talking about like, we're changing different polling places and things like that. So there's a lot of that. There were two like really, I would consider them contentious meetings where Eagle AI was the dominant topic of conversation. And one of them was October, 2023. And one of them was December, 2023. I know that was like a while ago now, but... But it's all been building up to this, right? It's been building up to this and they've been working like ahead of time trying to implement it. And then the next time for when I could tell where Eagle AI was discussed at length was in the October 2024 meeting.

18:57So the last meeting before the election, just last month. And that's sort of when they were like, we think that Eagle AI would be useful for us. Like we, we want to use it, but we didn't use it because we've just been so busy. And we like have a beta a test of it, but we ended up not using it for this election. Which doesn't mean they won't for a future one, if there are any more elections in the United States. It doesn't mean they won't for a future one. It doesn't mean that it's not being used elsewhere in the country. And that's why I wanted to get this story out because it's being pitched really heavily all over the country.

19:42And there are definitely election boards that are sympathetic to this idea or this cause. And I think it's important that people know, one, how it works and how it's being pitched. And two, I guess there are people showing up to fight this sort of thing. And I don't know. I think that not a lot of people probably go to their local county board of elections meetings they have them every month probably in most counties and it's like some of the people speaking out about this are pretty forceful about it and i think that you know that that's very good because it's a really like informed group of people that have come have shown up to like protest this more or less yeah um all right we will leave that there When we come back, we're going to talk about a piece of technology that is actually AI.

20:37I mean, I'm pretty sure it's a Microsoft product that was basically taken off the shelves and then people still had access. And there are a bunch of issues with that. We'll be right back after this.

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23:58All right, and we are back. Emmanuel wrote these two stories, but I'm sure Sam and Jason can pitch in here. The first one is, Microsoft provided gender detection AI on accident. Sam, so Microsoft previously had an AI that promised to detect certain things after looking at someone's face. What was it looking for exactly? Yeah, so it was, this would be part of like Microsoft's Azure face services, like their face capabilities. And it looked at a bunch of stuff. So it was inferring things like emotional states, parts of your identity, like your gender, age, whether or not you're smiling, whether or not you have facial hair, what kind of hair you have, whether you're making, where you're wearing makeup, things like that.

24:58So yeah, they, um, they had this service that basically could look at you and try to evaluate whether, um, you were a male or female and like make a bunch of assumptions based on what it sees. And it's retired those capabilities in 2022 as part of this big responsible AI push. It was this big splashy news item that Microsoft was saying, oh, we're going to put all these safeguards in for our facial recognition services because we realized that maybe they're not great or they're not working as intended or people aren't using them as intended. Maybe they're harmful. And that was one of them. yeah we we made the torment nexus and then we were like whoops my bad yeah you were supposed to make the torment nexus and they of course did right i don't know i just find that so funny and i know that like the development of ai in a technological sense is so so quick right you know every week every month whatever we see something new but it's just interesting that 2022 from a or slightly before that as well from a policy perspective feels like ancient history at this point where they're like oh we shouldn't have done that we shouldn't have released facial recognition which can identify your gender or emotional state are bad and if you like you wouldn't release that today you see what i mean and i just find that interesting yeah and it's like they they kind of were like oops and you know it was like this big positive thing it wasn't just like, oh, we did a bad.

26:39It was, we are responsible by, you know, winding down this particular use, this particular service, because, you know, we're so smart. And that's such a pattern, I think, in AI in general, is you introduce the thing really fast and don't really think about the repercussions of it. And apparently have no one on your team that has ever experienced any kind of prejudice and then you say oh we realized that actually we're so much smarter than everyone because we're responsible now and we're gonna do the right thing and aren't we the bigger man it's such a like it's such a vibe across the entire industry and microsoft was doing that in 2022 which you're right it was only two years ago and it feels like an eternity ago so consider like Like the state of AI even two years ago is nowhere near what it is today.

27:33It's all changed so, so, so fast. So, and Microsoft even had, I was looking at this before the podcast because I thought it was interesting that they had like a uses and then a maybe don't use it this way list on their documentation page. And it's like avoid using for task monitoring systems that can interfere with privacy. Avoid using where a human in the loop is needed. Don't use, carefully use, consider using in schools. It's things like that. And it's just a list of things that people are definitely going to do. It's like a suggestion. It's like if you have to say don't do it, people are doing it.

28:15I think on the same token, it's like, I think that it should go without saying, but I will say it anyway to be crystal clear. It's like gender detection, facial recognition, and gender detection, like AI is a pseudoscience for one. It is super like not accurate. In addition to being like a horrible idea, researchers who have researched it have shown like repeatedly that one, it's like not accurate. emotion detection ai is not accurate and two it's like if you're going to use it the torment nexus etc if you're going to use it the only ways that you can use it are to discriminate against people like that is that's literally the point it exists for yeah yeah it's literally the purpose because if you're trying to pigeonhole somebody into an emotional state or agenda that is you know that's just literally discrimination you're picking something there yeah exactly it's like phrenology but with ai's yeah it's algorithmic phrenology basically it's useless the other thing is that once i mean sam basically just said this but it's like once it's built other people spin it off and can use it regardless of whether microsoft uh you know officially releases it or not there was a researcher at a school in north carolina i don't have it up in front of me right now, but we covered it at Motherboard, who made what they called a gender detection AI.

29:50And what they did was fed it many, many, many stolen pictures from Reddit, from transgender transition progress picture subreddits, without any permission from anyone, built what they called a gender detection, you know, AI and like super bad. It was really bad. It became a very bad thing. They didn't store the data set in any sort of like secure way and it became an absolute mess. And so it's just like the reason that people build these things is to enable discriminatory things. Yeah. And as you both allude to, this is why in part Microsoft said, okay, well, if we can't stop people doing bad stuff necessarily, we're just going to stop offering it.

30:41And that's what they did in 2022. But it turns out that it was actually still active and accessible by some people who were using, as I understand it, basically an older version. you know they were almost like grandfathers into this earlier access so as well as that first piece emmanuel also published this other one which is about a project which i find incredibly fascinating and the title of the article is when does instagram decide a nipple becomes female and this is a project of uh ada ada ada i hope i pronounced that correctly and what she did was basically document her transition with photographic evidence every day or to regular intervals and process those through various um ai detection systems so there is the microsoft one in there um i think there's an amazon one as well and of course instagram right uh which is what the headline alludes to and it's well when does this computer system decide that i've transitioned you know in the eyes of this not caring machine.

31:51When is my nipple now technically a female nipple? And I guess, I mean, to us, it's kind of obvious why you want to test Instagram specifically, because Instagram has a very long storied history with nudity and with nipples specifically. So, Sam, how does Instagram treat nipples exactly in its moderation efforts? Yeah, I mean, it's just like, it's, this is such a, an ongoing, like who the fuck knows moment for Instagram is like the nipple thing has gone on forever. Um, technically Instagram has policies against nudity and they, they don't allow, I mean, I'll just quote straight from them because it's such a funny line, uh, photos, videos, and digitally created content that shows sexual intercourse, genitals, and closeups.

32:48of fully nude buttocks. I don't know how close you need to be, but close-ups. And it also includes female nipples, is what the line says in Instagram's terms of service. But breastfeeding, giving birth, and afterbirth moments, and health-related situations, as well as breast cancer awareness, or gender confirmation surgery, or things like that, or acts of protest are allowed. So it's like, Like when is it's the eternal question of the internet is like, when is a nipple female? It's an old thing from Tumblr from like 2018. It's like female presenting nipples was like the meta on Tumblr for a long time because they change their terms of service to say female presenting nipples were not allowed, but all the other nipples are okay.

33:35Like when do you define a nipple as being female? And Instagram makes all of this way more confusing by applying it so irregularly and disproportionately. It's like sometimes a nipple is okay. Sometimes it gets you perma-banned. Sometimes it's like you'll see like Playboy models and browsers being like, you know, on Instagram showing almost total nudity and then you'll get banned from Instagram for showing like side boob. It's so confusing and it makes no sense. And it disproportionately affects trans people, fat people, people of color, and also sex workers and sex educators and anyone doing what Instagram says is okay to do on Instagram, like sex education and things like that.

34:23So yeah, that's the environment that AdaAdaAda was working in. And I think that's so interesting. And she found out about the Azure thing because she was using a couple different facial recognition tools and services to track when those also detected. Like, when did they rate her as female? When did they not? It was all just kind of like in a spreadsheet for her, which I think is so... nerdy and fun. But yeah, that's Instagram's line on it. And testing it is super interesting. Yeah. I'll just read out a quote from her, which says, I'm really interested in algorithmic enforcement and generally understanding the impacts that algorithms have on our lives.