Officials Find No Evidence USA Today’s Voter Sob Story Happened

In an article smearing citizen challenges to suspicious voter roll entries, USA Today’s Maya Homan told a sympathetic story about Candace Smith, an attorney who discovered a “challenge to her voter registration status” when she went to vote in the May 2024 presidential primary in Fulton County where she has reportedly “been an active voter” for “decades.” But as far as certain Fulton County officials can tell, the challenge never actually happened.

Homan’s article, titled “New Georgia law makes voter intimidation easier, critics say; affects Black voters most,” opened by detailing Smith’s shock and frustration, with Smith also reportedly asserting that “the challenge did not include any reason or evidence.”

Homan says Smith is a “longtime proponent of voting rights efforts in Georgia” and that she was “well positioned to advocate for her rights.” Smith is said to have “quickly contacted the Fulton County Elections Office, raising the issue to a supervisor to make doubly sure that her ballot had counted,” according to Homan. 

“But for the average person,” Smith reportedly told Homan, “encountering a voter challenge could pose an insurmountable barrier.” 

Homan continued, “Had [Smith] less time or knowledge about the complex web of election infrastructure, she said, ‘that might be an issue that prevented me from voting, and it also might be something that would deter me from bothering in the fall.’”

A search of the Georgia Bar Association website produced two possible matches, a “Candace Noelle Smith” and a “Lisa Candace Smith.”  When I checked a copy of the voter database from May of 2022, I found a total of six voters with the first or middle name “Candace” and last name “Smith,” and two appeared to match the attorneys. I emailed both Candace Smiths I found on the Georgia Bar’s website but received no response from either. 

After I sent the data I found to Fulton County Commissioner Bridget Thorne, her concerns were taken to Fulton County Registration Manager Kathryn Glenn, who researched the issue. Glenn found no indication that their “voter participation” had ever been challenged. Thorne told me she has since asked the county attorney and director of external affairs to reach out to Homan to ask for a correction.

I also emailed Homan but did not receive a response. 

I inquired about Smith’s assertion that “the challenge did not include any reason or evidence,” pointing out that, “Both of our challenge statutes, OCGA 21-2-229 and OCGA 21-2-230 require that ‘Such challenges shall be in writing and shall specify distinctly the grounds of the challenge.’” 

“If that was not done, but the challenge was accepted, and her record was flagged, why did you take issue with the challenge, and not with Fulton County for accepting it?” I asked.

I also noted that she had used the term, “election conspiracy theorists” four times and asked her to define what she meant by it.

Homan made another inflammatory claim about voter challenges, saying: “Citizen voter challenges, once an obscure practice, have transformed into a mass movement in Georgia, with conservative activists challenging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in the last several years.” 

She also claimed activists are “using complaints of rampant voter fraud to cast doubt on election results.” But, as in other states, illegally cast votes are legitimate legal grounds for contesting an election under Georgia law.

Homan also portrayed challenges to voter registrations as a racial issue. Without citing evidence, she asserted that “[v]oters of color — and Black voters in particular — have been disproportionately impacted by these vast disenfranchisement campaigns.” She then attempted to tie modern voter challenges to Jim Crow-era policies where black voters were targeted specifically because of their race, stating, “[i]n Georgia, citizen campaigns to challenge election registration date back to the 1940s, when white supremacists mobilized to prevent Black voters from accessing the polls” — a claim that smacks of partisan calumny.

Homan chided voter challenge software EagleAI (pronounced “Eagle Eye”) for, as she claims, apparently sharing a name with “Operation Eagle Eye, a 1960s-era effort in Arizona aimed at suppressing voter access among people of color.”

EagleAI’s founder, Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards, told me he had never heard of  “Operation Eagle Eye” until “he read it in a recent article that attempted to play the race card.” He told me his company name came from the fact that he and his sons are Eagle Scouts and jokingly referred to themselves as being of at least “average intelligence.” 

I asked Homan why she didn’t contact Richards herself. 

Homan’s characterization of Georgia citizen voter challengers as a “mass movement” is also somewhat at odds with her later assertion that, “[t]hough only a small number of people are routinely filing voter challenges, the open-ended nature of voter challenge laws has allowed these activists to cast a wide net.” She goes on to cite a 2023 ProPublica investigation, which, as Homan summarized, “found that nearly 90% of voter challenges filed since the passage of SB 202 — encompassing 89,000 voters — were submitted by just six people.”

The ProPublica article she cites by Doug Bock Clark criticizes challenges made by Fulton activist Jason Frazier and Forsyth County’s Frank Schneider. When I spoke with Frazier and Schneider, they both made it clear they do not view election integrity as a partisan issue and that neither of them discriminates for or against any voter based on race or partisanship. They rely only on issues their analyses reveal.

Clark described how a challenge made by Schneider was sent in 2022 to an “unhoused voter” who was registered at a post office box while “living in a tent in the woods.” While homeless Georgians absolutely possess the right to vote, Georgia law requires that residency “shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any present intention of removing therefrom.” Even the nearest cross street is acceptable for the homeless, but a post office box may be miles away, in a different voting district, and typically no one actually lives in a post office.

Along the same lines, Clark cited another Fulton County challenge to a voter who was a cancer patient, which was unknown to challenger Jason Frazier. Like Schneider, Frazier’s concerns included people registered at post office boxes, and unfortunately, that voter was one of “approximately a thousand” challenges he submitted in January 2023. 

Moreover, like the USA Today article, ProPublica paints citizen efforts to clean up the voter rolls as mean-spirited, partisan, or even racist. As another example, Clark’s article trivializes Frazier’s efforts to correct addresses he identified as commercial or had other issues including inaccurate post directionals such as “SE” instead of “NE.” The latter of those issues may sound trivial, but they can interfere with the proper assignment of voting districts and with the delivery of absentee ballots.

Countless businesses all across the United States rely on the U.S. Postal Service’s Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) certification software approved by the USPS to identify addresses as commercial or residential or to correct these types of minor errors in street addresses, yet for some reason not all of Georgia’s voter records appear to be CASS certified, which can and should be rectified.

I also noted in my email to Homan that she had quoted Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the nonprofit voting rights group Fair Fight, who claimed in the article that “[y]ou can look back and see how often there was race-neutral language around the practices and statutes at the time to ‘clean’ the voter rolls, and then racially targeted efforts to remove Black folks.”

I asked Homan whether she was aware that Groh-Wargo’s organization made claims of racial and other demographic targeting and voter intimidation in the Fair Fight v. True the Vote case, in which Fair Fight sued me along with True the Vote and another co-defendant for our voter eligibility challenges. I described how the case “was tried before Federal District Court Judge Steve Jones in the Northern District of Georgia and Judge Jones, an Obama appointee, found no evidence whatsoever of any voter intimidation by any of the defendants.”

What none of these critics of election integrity efforts ever seem to acknowledge or understand is the fact that if our voter rolls were being well maintained and kept current, activists would have little to no legitimate legal grounds to even bring challenges in the first place, and county boards would have no reason to accept them either.

Critics also bemoan the “large volume” of challenges but never seem to stop and ask themselves why our voter rolls have such a “large volume” of issues.

Not only that, but ensuring election integrity is one of the primary duties — if not the primary duty — of our election officials. In fact, OCGA 21-2-590 states that any poll officer who “Permits any person registered as an elector to vote, knowing that such person is not qualified to vote, whether or not such person has been challenged” “shall be guilty of a felony.” That same statute also bars poll officers from refusing “to permit any duly registered and qualified person” from casting a vote. 

So here’s the obvious question: If citizen challenges are as illegitimate and racially motivated as some like to claim, and they cannot legally be sustained if a voter is qualified, what are critics really concerned about?

I have yet to receive a response from Holman to any of my questions.

Mark Davis is president of Data Productions, Inc., and has been working with voter data since 1986. He has been qualified and admitted to testify as an expert witness on voter data analytics and residency issues in court cases involving disputed elections five times over the last 20 years.