Inside the ‘Election Integrity’ App Built to Purge US Voter Rolls

There was a challenge to Turner's eligibility to vote ten days before the Senate election. Turner, a retired major in the US Army, had requested an Absentee Ballot and when it didn't arrive in the mail, he called the Muscogee County registrar's office to find out where it was. Turner was told by a clerk that his name was on a list of thousands of voters who were under investigation.

I was really angry. Turner said that he was yelling. I didn't know what voter challenges were. I was wondering if I would be able to vote or not.

Turner has resided in Georgia for his entire life and voted in every election for 50 years. The utility bills are in his name. He has a Georgia driver's license that he uses to drive his cars. He had to temporarily relocate to California in order to keep his job. In order to avoid missing packages while away on his temporary work assignment, he notified the USPS that he wanted his mail forwarded to a different address.

Turner didn't know at the time that this simple notification to the USPS would be used to challenge the voter registration of 364,000 Georgians.

True the Vote was best known for its work on the film 2,000 Mules, but it had also developed a way to match names in voter rolls with data from the USPS. The group wanted to get rid of voter rolls under the belief that voter fraud is rare in the US.

True the Vote sent the names of 4,000 ineligible voters to the leader of the Republican Party in Muscogee County, who in turn sent them to the Board of Elections to challenge their voter registration. Turner successfully sued the Muscogee County Board of Elections to ensure his ballot would be counted after True the Vote challenged it.

The web app called IV3 was quietly rolled out by True the Vote. Hundreds of thousands of voter registration challenges have been caused by the browser-based application. It's not clear what's known about IV3. You need a valid form of identification to get access to the app in most states. WIRED has been able to piece together how the tool likely works by analyzing the code IV3 uses. The app uses an unreliable methodology to determine who should stay on the rolls, according to our review. The app weaponizes public data and is more likely to remove eligible voters from the rolls than it is to catch rampant fraud that doesn't exist in this country, according to experts.