After Republicans lost badly in the midterms, a Republican member of the election board in Forsyth County, Georgia, went after his own neighbors' ballots.
Max Clavijo questioned whether 69 voters were eligible to vote, ProPublica reports. He told the board that four of them were dead.
ProPublica found all four. They are alive.
"I don't know where they're getting their information from, but it's false," one of them, Chris Strickland, told ProPublica. "I'm alive. I'm here."
Where the "dead voters" came from
Clavijo is a member of the Election Integrity Network. It's a group led by Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who worked closely with Donald Trump when he tried to overturn his 2020 loss. The group works to restrict voting and tighten election rules.
His list came from a data tool called ELLY's Election Monitor. Another member of the same group, Rick Richards, built it. It pulls together public records: voter files, change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries, even listings from real estate sites like Zillow. Richards told ProPublica he gave Clavijo the Forsyth County data at Clavijo's request.
The tool can't see voters' Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers or full birthdays. That makes it easy to mix up two people with the same name. Voting rights groups have called it error-prone. In Cherokee County, the election director complained to the state after the tool falsely flagged a county board member's spouse as dead.
Georgia's State Election Board members and top staff have still urged counties to use it.
They were planning this before the votes were counted
Before the election, the group's activists talked about using ELLY to fight Republican losses.
On a podcast in late September, Richards talked up the tool while right-wing personalities said it could help Republican candidates contest their defeats. "This data will be able to set up challenges to those who lose," one commentator said.
The next month, on a private call reviewed by ProPublica, Richards promised to give data from more than 3,000 counties to "citizen monitors" and Republican candidates to try to prove fraud.
What happened in Forsyth County
Late last week, Clavijo sent documents to the board and the county's election director. Using ELLY data, he questioned whether the names of more than 22,000 people on the county's voter list were correct. He disputed 69 voters by name. He said some had moved, some had voter ID problems, and some had signed up under fake names.
Most of the challenges, 38 of them, were voters who registered with an initial instead of a first name, according to people familiar with the matter. One of them, Alexander Knight, told ProPublica he goes by his middle name, and his voter record matches what the state's driver's license office told him to use. "I am real," he said.
For the four "dead" voters, Clavijo and Richards turned in obituaries. But all four obituaries said or suggested the person who died lived outside Forsyth County. One said Arizona. The details in them didn't match the voters' own records.
Alexis Ramirez, a night-shift nurse, had voted early. "It's kind of crazy that they attempted to do that without trying to prove it first," she said.
Clavijo's own cover letter said the challenges had not been checked by any "human review," according to sources familiar with the matter. At the meeting, he admitted he couldn't vouch for the data. "I did not make any explicit accusation that the information was 100% correct," he said.
The board rejected the challenge to the four voters' ballots. Even a Republican board member, Joel Natt, said Clavijo's accusations had "no relevance to anybody here" until they were backed by solid evidence through the proper channel.
The tone comes from the top
This didn't happen in a vacuum. Right after the election, Trump said he would accept the results. Then he changed his mind. By Monday, he was posting, "Does anybody really believe that this 'Election' was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???"
Forsyth County isn't the only place election deniers got their hands on the count this year. In California, far-right supervisors put an election denier in charge of Shasta County's vote, and it was the only county in the state still stuck counting in-person votes the next morning.
What the record shows
After the 2026 midterms, a Republican election board member in Forsyth County, Georgia, used a data tool built by Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network to question 69 voters and more than 22,000 names on the voter list. He claimed four of those voters were dead. ProPublica found all four alive, his own cover letter said the data had no human review, and the board rejected the challenge to their ballots.
Source
ProPublica: "A Tool Built by Election Deniers Said These Voters Were Dead. We Found Them Alive."
