Florida is using a fraud-hunting tool used by the right to look for voters to remove from the rolls

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida wants local elections officials to use data collected by far-right activists, some of whom falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen, to potentially remove people from the state’s voter rolls, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

The network of activists has been collecting voter data in 24 states, and on May 3, one of them emailed the Florida-specific information to a top state election official. It included the names of roughly 10,000 voters from across the state the group insists should be examined for potential removal from the voter rolls, a process commonly referred to as list maintenance.

The state’s chief elections official then forwarded that information to county election supervisors and asked them to “take action.”

“I apologize for the delay in forwarding the following email and attachment from a concerned citizen regarding potential interstate registered voters,” Maria Matthews, the director of the Florida Division of Elections, wrote in a May 15 email, two weeks after she was originally sent the 10,000 names.

Matthews acknowledged it was unclear how the list of names was compiled or where the data came from.

“I do not know when the information was exactly compiled and what all sources were consulted to derive this list,” she wrote.

The “concerned citizen” who sent the May 3 email was Dan Heim, a longtime Florida-based activist who has made unfounded voter fraud claims across the state. He told Matthews in the email that he worked with a group that helped create a program called EagleAI (pronounced “Eagle Eye”), a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promise to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other