After months of rewriting rules, the Georgia Board of Elections will meet again before November. • Georgia Recorder

On Tuesday’s agenda for the controversial Georgia State Election Board is an investigation into allegations that several county election boards failed to properly investigate challenges questioning voter eligibility.

The state election board will hold its last scheduled meeting Tuesday before the Nov. 5 general election, where rules adopted by three members of former President Donald Trump face legal challenges.

On Tuesday, Board of Elections Executive Director Mike Coan will present the results of an investigation into allegations that eight county boards of elections are run by Democrats to reject complaints unlawfully about the voting rights of tens of thousands of voters.

Election board members Janelle King, Janice Johnston and Rick Jeffares, who were recently praised by former President Donald Trump at a rally in Atlanta, voted on Sept. 23 for Coan to investigate the allegations that led to the DeKalb County Republican Party claimed the DeKalb board was unable to follow the law in reviewing voter eligibility complaints.

The mass voter challenge controversy has been a mainstay of Georgia politics in recent years since there has been a frenzy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Trump narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Many conservatives have argued that voter registration lists need to be purged of ineligible votes, while Democrats and progressive activists have argued that mass voter challenges are aimed at intimidating and removing voters who should remain eligible to vote.

Activists and GOP-aligned groups are now using data-scraping technologies to examine Google in search of possible signs that voters have left their precinct using artificial intelligence apps like EagleAI.

An analysis conducted by TargetSmart, a market research firm, found a number of issues with the data sources used in these voter challenges. The analysis was conducted on behalf of the progressive nonprofit Fair Fight Action and says tools like EagleAI use problematic national change of address data as the basis for voter challenges.

“They tend to search the Internet for anything that links the voter’s information to information that indicates their registration should have expired: for example, an obituary, a business address, or a social media post,” says the TargetSmart report. “However, searching for a voter’s name and address online is likely to result in false matches or misleading information; Any “evidence” produced by this type of search should be viewed with skepticism and certainly investigated further.”

Several million Georgians are expected to cast mail-in ballots and vote in person at polling stations by November 5th. Then the presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris could be decided, as well as other seats in Congress that are still up for grabs, 236 in the state legislature and more. According to current polls, Georgia is considered one of seven swing states in the presidential race. The statewide three-week early voting period runs from October 15th to November 1st.

Republican state lawmakers passed a bill in March defining probable cause for challenges to voting eligibility.

Under Georgia law, only a registered voter from the same county or municipality can challenge another voter’s eligibility before or on Election Day. A person challenging another voter must submit the challenge in writing and provide the reasons for the challenge.

The new law states that vOther eligibility challenges filed within 45 days of an election cannot be heard until after the election has been certified.

A federal judge in Atlanta ruled in January that the right-wing party True the Vote had not violated the Voting Rights Act, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by Fair Fight Action. It said the group sought to intimidate voters by questioning the eligibility of thousands of Georgia voters in advance of two U.S. Senate runoff elections in early 2021.

“The data used by far-right election deniers to challenge Georgians’ freedom to vote is based on incomplete and inaccurate information – ultimately, it should not be used to remove voters,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, on Friday in a statement. “It seems clear that the Trump campaign and the MAGA operation plan to use these erroneous claims, just as they did in 2020, to spread lies about voter fraud to mobilize their base and undermine the election results .”

Unresolved election certification lawsuits

The State Election Board’s recent series of new rules for counting ballots, certifying elections and expanding poll watcher access have led to lawsuits in Georgia courts.

Several lawsuits seek to block rules passed by the majority of the five-member board that could be implemented for the upcoming election.

The board previously adopted a new rule that allows local election board members to access all election records and use any discrepancies to determine whether to vote to certify an election. The new certification rules require members of the county election board to conduct an appropriate investigation before certifying the results and allow inspection of all election-related documents before certifying the election.

Last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said during hearings on election certification lawsuits that the reasonable inquiry rule was vague and needed clarification.

He said he plans to govern before the November election about the lawsuit filed by the state and national Democratic parties seeking to overturn the rules or clarify that they do not allow election board members to delay certification beyond the Nov. 12 deadline .

McBurney will also soon rule on a lawsuit from Fulton Board of Elections member Julie Adams asking the court to give local officials discretion to refuse to certify results.