Votebeat

Social media post shared by Trump misinterprets the way Wisconsin manages its voter rolls

2026-01-29T21:48:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

A misleading claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than people eligible to vote is gaining traction on social media, including in posts shared this week by President Donald Trump.

It’s just the latest in a long-running series of claims that misinterpret basic data about voter rolls to create alarm about the risk of voter fraud.

The posts circulating this week cite videos asserting that Wisconsin’s voter rolls contain more than 7 million names — far more than the state’s voting age population — and are overlaid with text reading, “This Is Not a Glitch — This Is Election Fraud Waiting To Happen.”

The videos feature Peter Bernegger, an entrepreneur who has been convicted of mail fraud and bank fraud. Bernegger has repeatedly promoted false theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin legislative hearings and repeatedly filed unsuccessful lawsuits against election officials in search of proof for his claims.

But his claim conflates two different datasets in Wisconsin’s voter registration system: the Wisconsin voter list and active registered voters.

As of July 2025, the state had about 8.3 million names on its voter list — in line with the number Bernegger cites. But of them, only 3.7 million were active registered voters. The remaining roughly 4.6 million are inactive voters. Inactive records include people who previously registered to vote but later moved out of state, died, lost eligibility because of a felony conviction, or were ruled incompetent to vote by a court. Those individuals haven’t been removed from the voter list, but because of their inactive status, they cannot vote unless they re-register, which requires proof of residency and a photo ID.

Bernegger claims in his video that the list of voters generally grows every day, going down only once every four years, when voters who haven’t cast a ballot in four years are sent postcards asking whether they want to remain registered, and then removed from the active list if they don’t respond.

Part of that claim is true: Wisconsin never deletes voter records, so the total database of active and inactive registrations only grows. But the active voter roll, which includes only voters currently eligible to cast a ballot, can shrink.

By email, Bernegger disputed Votebeat’s characterization of his claims but provided no further proof for them.

The confusion stems from a common misunderstanding about Wisconsin’s voter system, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, told Votebeat. The pollbooks used to check voters’ eligibility on Election Day contain only active voters, while the broader voter database also retains inactive records.

The inactive records also detail why a voter was deactivated. Wisconsin state law allows for several reasons for a voter’s registration status to be changed from eligible to ineligible, but there’s no state law calling for the destruction of voter registration records, not even for a voter who has died.

And Jacobs said there’s a good reason for that: Keeping these inactive records indefinitely helps prevent fraud: If somebody tries to register using the identity of a dead voter, for example, clerks can flag that application, because the prior record — including the reason it was deactivated — is still on file.

“It’s actually pro-list-hygiene to have access to that information immediately,” she said.

Interstate databases also play a role in maintaining accurate voter rolls. One such organization, the Electronic Registration Information Center, has helped states including Wisconsin identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines, and tens of thousands of voters who died. But the system has gaps. Some Republican-led states have left the program, leaving just 25 states and Washington, D.C., participating.

Experts say voter fraud is extremely rare, but Republicans have long argued that dirty voter rolls could enable fraud and reduce confidence.

Similar misleading claims about voter rolls have circulated in other states, including Michigan, amplified by right-wing figures such as Elon Musk.

Democrats and many election officials typically support regular voter roll maintenance but warn that aggressive cleanup efforts may risk disenfranchising lawful, active voters.

Wisconsin’s own data shows how infrequently fraud occurs. In its latest report, which covers five elections, the WEC identified just 30 potential instances of fraud. One relates to a voter seeking to vote in two states. Most involved voting after a felony conviction or double-voting by casting an absentee and in-person vote in the same election.

Correction: This story was updated to reflect the number of names on the state’s voter list was 8.3 million and the number of suspected instances of fraud in a 2024 Wisconsin Elections Commission report as 30.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania disputes claim that it’s in talks to share voter rolls with Ohio

2026-01-08T20:55:20+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Pennsylvania officials say they’re not in discussions to hand over private voter information to Ohio, where officials are trying to identify voters who are double-registered following the state’s departure from a bipartisan voter data sharing program.

In December, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, announced a “multi-state election integrity network” called EleXa that will share its voter rolls with 10 other states to “identify people who try to vote illegally, often by having more than one active voter registration and then casting multiple ballots in the same election.”

The press release also said that Pennsylvania was “finalizing an agreement” to join the program.

But officials in Pennsylvania say that is not the case. Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said the two state agencies spoke last summer about a possible information-sharing agreement, but the conversation ultimately fizzled out.

“In September, our Department provided Ohio with revisions to a proposed agreement that would accomplish that objective while protecting voters’ private information,” she said in a statement. “We never received a response, and we never engaged in any discussions about joining any larger election-data-sharing initiative with Ohio.”

Pennsylvania is still a member of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a longstanding multi-state voter roll maintenance program that pools voter lists and other data sets to identify voters who should be removed from the rolls, as well as those who may be eligible but unregistered. The program has faced a wave of pushback from conservatives who argued that the program was too focused on finding potentially eligible voters and not enough on identifying ineligible voters.

Voters often fail to cancel outdated registrations when moving, leading to duplicate registrations across state lines that programs like ERIC and EleXa are aimed at addressing. Double-voting itself, however, is rare.

Several Republican-led states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, including Ohio, which pulled out in early 2023 at LaRose’s direction. Since then, Ohio and the other states that left ERIC have been entering into data-sharing agreements with each other to try to replace its services.

In response to Pennsylvania’s pushback to the claim it was joining the EleXa program, Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for the Ohio secretary of state’s office, said Pennsylvania had shared its voter file with Ohio and that they were “obviously negotiating the terms of an ongoing agreement to share additional non-public data.”

“We’ve had productive conversations with them and are optimistic we’ll be able to reach a final agreement, as we hope they share the same goal of ensuring election integrity,” Kindle said.

Pennsylvania said the only data that it shared with Ohio is the public version of the voter roll, which can be purchased online for $20 and does not contain the partial Social Security or driver’s license numbers needed to reliably match voters across state lines.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

ERIC data-sharing alliance helps uncover alleged double voting case in Pennsylvania

2025-09-09T17:14:33+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Officials uncovered a five-year-old case of double voting in Pennsylvania with the help of a voter roll maintenance program that has been the target of conservative attacks in recent years.

The case involved a man named Matthew Laiss, who moved from Pennsylvania to Florida in August 2020, and allegedly voted both in person in Florida and via mail ballot in Bucks County in that year’s November election, prosecutors said.

David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, announced charges against Laiss last week. Pennsylvania’s Department of State confirmed the alleged double vote was identified using data from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. Metcalf also announced another set of fraud charges last week, in a case that was not discovered via ERIC.

The announcement that ERIC helped prosecutors uncover alleged double voting comes amid broader questions about the merits of the program. ERIC is a consortium comprising 26 states and the District of Columbia that collects state voter roll data and alerts its members to potentially inaccurate or duplicate voter registration records. It compares state datasets such as driver’s license databases, death records and voter rolls, along with other sources of information, to find cross-state or intra-state matches.

ERIC also helps identify eligible voters who aren’t yet registered. Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary of state, Jonathan Marks, chairs ERIC’s board.

One of its regular functions, Executive Director Shane Hamlin said, is a biennial report identifying possible double voting, the most recent of which came out in March of this year.

“While voter fraud is rare, this is a great example of why ERIC is a great tool,” Hamlin said, adding that the data it provides helps states investigate fraud and hand credible cases over to law enforcement.

Florida was a member of ERIC in 2020, making it possible for the system to compare that state’s voter roll data against Pennsylvania’s and discover the type of fraud allegedly committed by Laiss.

But Florida left ERIC in 2023, as did several other Republican-led states in recent years, following attacks from conservative activists and media outlets that accused it of focusing on working to register left-leaning voters rather than prioritizing cleaning voter rolls.

In the other case announced last week, prosecutors charged Miya Pack of Philadelphia with double voting in the 2024 election, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New Jersey only recently joined ERIC, and it hadn’t yet provided data for the program’s most recent analysis.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

A guide to understanding the debate over keeping voter rolls ‘clean’

2025-09-04T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up to have Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

The federal government’s demands that states turn over their voter rolls and related information highlights longstanding conflicts over how to ensure that only eligible voters are registered without endangering voting rights.

The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to several states — and plans to send many more — asking them for copies of their voter lists and for detailed information about how they maintain them. The department has said it’s seeking to enforce requirements in federal law that President Donald Trump has ordered it to prioritize.

It has already sued North Carolina, alleging that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity, and sued Orange County, California, for refusing to provide full records for 17 people who have been removed from the rolls in connection with a probe of potential noncitizen voting. And it has threatened to sue or withhold federal funding from other states if they do not comply with their requests for information.

Everyone agrees that a “clean” voter list — cleared of people who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction, or who otherwise aren’t eligible to vote — is good practice. But they differ on how aggressively election officials should move to remove potentially ineligible voters, what exactly federal law requires election officials to do, and how to balance election security with the risk of wrongly removing and disenfranchising eligible voters.

Rhetoric and false claims can make the debate harder to follow. Here’s a guide to understanding the issues and arguments.

What does the law require?

There are two key federal laws that govern the maintenance of voter rolls.

The National Voter Registration Act requires election officials to make a “reasonable effort” to remove voters who become ineligible to vote because they move or die, a process known as list maintenance. The Help America Vote Act, enacted about a decade later, requires states to use a computerized statewide list of every registered voter and assign them a unique identification number. It also requires them to remove duplicated names.

Beyond that, it’s up to state and local governments to set their own policies for how and when to perform list maintenance, and it’s up to federal courts to decide what is “reasonable.” That term isn’t defined in the law, and it’s often where voting rights groups and advocates for stricter list maintenance disagree.

In a recent case in Michigan, for example, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the state’s actions to remove the names of thousands of dead voters from the rolls were sufficient, even though the plaintiff, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, claimed to have identified thousands more on the rolls.

Logan Churchwell, research director at the foundation said in an interview that the court’s decision amounted to giving Michigan an “E for effort.” He said his organization believes there should be a higher standard that would reduce the risk of fraud and administrative error.

For her part, Lata Nott, director of voting rights policy for Campaign Legal Center, said the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement for a “reasonable effort” at maintaining lists is designed to set a floor, but it doesn’t prevent states from creating extreme policies that lead to eligible voters being mistakenly removed.

What is the central issue in the debate?

The main disagreement is over how aggressive list maintenance should be. A recent congressional hearing highlighted the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this question.

House Republicans claimed dirty voter rolls enable fraud, and said ensuring that only eligible voters are on the list increases election security and voter confidence. They dismissed the idea that their efforts are meant to purge certain types of eligible voters from the rolls, such as people of color.

“This is not and should never be a partisan issue,” said Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican and former secretary of state. “Maintaining accurate voter rolls is fundamental to election security and public trust.”

House Democrats made it clear that they, too, don’t want ineligible voters, such as dead people or noncitizens, on the list. But they questioned why Republicans would want to take any actions that could potentially disenfranchise eligible people, citing recent incidents of state list maintenance actions that led to eligible voters being removed.

“What we do want is every eligible voter gets the chance to vote and their constitutional rights are not infringed upon,” said Rep. Julie Johnson, a Texas Democrat. “And that seems to be a huge distinction.”

Why is it hard to keep voter rolls updated?

It is difficult partly because of the decentralized nature of voting.

The U.S. doesn’t have a national database of eligible voters or citizens. Under federal law, states maintain their own lists. They assign voters the ID number that’s required under the Help America Vote Act, but that number doesn’t have to be connected to any existing federal identification, such as a Social Security number.

To remove voters who were eligible, but aren’t anymore, election officials must have ways to find out when a voter dies, moves to another state, is convicted of a felony, or otherwise becomes ineligible to cast a ballot.

Many election officials get data on address changes from their state’s motor-vehicle department and the U.S. Postal Service, and get death reports from state and federal agencies. Some states allow or mandate the use of other sources, such as obituaries and responses to jury duty summonses.

But there are po1tential gaps and time lags in these systems. When people move, for example, they don’t often tell the election office for their old address to remove them from the rolls.

It’s fairly easy for officials to track in-state moves, because people carry the same state-assigned voter ID number when they go to register in a new location in the state. But it’s harder for officials to find out when someone moves out of state. That requires coordination between states, or more detailed searches through government records.

Many states are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a consortium that collects state voter roll data and alerts its members to potentially duplicate registrations across state lines. But two of the largest states, California and New York, are not members. And several Republican states have withdrawn from ERIC in recent years, citing concerns about the program, including about how the organization shares some of its data with researchers.

Do some states have more registered voters than residents?

Statistics like this are often used to back up claims of voter fraud or poor state practices. But there’s a legitimate explanation for this that’s tied to federal and state laws.

In some instances, state laws allow election officials to remove voters from the rolls quickly, such as when they die, or if they respond to a jury duty summons by saying they are not a U.S. citizen.

But when a state finds out a voter may have moved, federal law requires election officials to send a confirmation mailing before removing that person from the rolls. If the voter doesn’t respond, they remain on the roll of registered voters, but are moved to the “inactive” list, and their names must stay there for two federal election cycles before they are removed, unless the state hears from them.

That four-year wait, and a large number of voters on the inactive list, can make the voter roll appear bloated at any given time.

But another reason for the disparity is that population estimates themselves are imprecise, said Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demography at Penn State University who studies voter rolls and census data.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey is currently our best measure of population changes from year to year, Fowler said. But the uncertainty in the national population count is about 10 million residents, he said — roughly equal to the population of Michigan.

Some use the disparities between the numbers to cast doubt on the accuracy of elections and raise alarm about voter fraud, such as Elon Musk with his misleading claim that Michigan had “more registered voters than eligible citizens.” His numbers included inactive voters as if they were eligible voters. But before those voters could cast a ballot, they would have to correct their voting record to prove eligibility, most commonly by showing documentation proving they still live in the jurisdiction.

How ‘dirty’ are the voter rolls?

Some of the most cited data available on this comes from more than a decade ago, and has helped inspire efforts at improvement since then. But those efforts have run into challenges.

In 2012, a research study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state, and there were more than 1.8 million dead people whose names were still on the voter rolls. These and other findings “underscore the need for states to improve accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency,” Pew said.

There have been multiple attempts to create systems allowing states to share data to help with voter list maintenance. That’s a difficult task, because any such effort must comply with state and federal laws governing data use and privacy. Officials must also cross-check data from various sources, using enough different data points to ensure that the matches are accurate, and that a person with the same name as another isn’t mistakenly removed as a duplicate.

One prior program, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, was ultimately shut down under a court settlement because it did not do enough to protect sensitive voter data. It was also found to be highly inaccurate, often incorrectly identifying registrations as duplicates because of poor matching techniques.

After Pew’s study, the nonprofit provided funding to help launch ERIC, to try to screen out duplicate voter registrations across state lines. Since then, ERIC has helped states identify hundreds of thousands of voters each year who have moved across state lines, and tens of thousands of voters who died. But in part because some Republican states have left the program, only half of states now participate, leaving a lot of gaps.

Some states use more data sources and perform checks more frequently than others. In the latest federal survey of election officials, for example, about 30% of states said they do not use National Change of Address reports from the U.S. Postal Service or data from motor vehicle agencies to identify potentially ineligible voters.

Do poorly maintained voter rolls allow for more fraud?

Generally speaking, removing a voter who has moved prevents them from wrongly voting in their old voting jurisdiction, and removing a voter who has died prevents another person from fraudulently casting a ballot in their name.

That said, prosecutions for double voting and voting for others are rare, and Votebeat could not find any studies showing that states that do a better job of cleaning voter rolls have less voter fraud.

The Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud across all states since 1982 includes 174 convictions for duplicate voting, 99 cases of noncitizen voting, and two cases of someone voting under a dead person’s name.

But Churchwell, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the number of prosecutions does not properly measure how much fraud occurs. Rather, he said, it indicates the state’s propensity to prosecute. “I doubt you’ll find research showing where a state is simultaneously terrible at list maintenance yet zealous with prosecutions,” he said.

Are there noncitizens on the voter rolls?

Yes, but states that have looked have not found them in large numbers.

Audits in multiple states have found small numbers of noncitizens on the rolls, few of whom had actually cast ballots, and there are no known instances of noncitizens voting in large enough numbers to influence the outcome of an election.

The threat of noncitizen voting has become a prominent talking point for Republicans, driving their efforts to pass proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. But even in Republican-led states, officials who have recently tried to find noncitizens on the rolls have reported only small numbers.

In an audit last year, for example, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office found 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of them had voted in prior elections, the office found. In Ohio, only one of the 641 cases of noncitizen voting that Secretary of State Frank LaRose referred for prosecution resulted in a voter fraud charge.

In Texas, which has more than 18.6 million registered voters, the Secretary of State’s Office identified 581 noncitizens from 2021 to August of 2024. The state referred 33 potential noncitizens who voted in the 2024 election to the attorney general for investigation. The state also is investigating potential cases from the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

In Michigan, where activists are working to get a proof-of-citizenship requirement enacted, a review this year by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office found 15 noncitizens who voted in the November 2024 election.

In Arizona, which requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, identified at least 2,331 registered voters who he believes are highly likely to be noncitizens. He studied the state’s voter rolls as an expert defense witness for a case challenging the state’s proof of citizenship laws. Richman said those people could have become naturalized citizens since last updating their license, but the ID they used when registering to vote or updating their registration was a noncitizen ID.

On Aug. 28, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of a Canadian citizen charged with registering to vote and voting in federal elections in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024.

Are there dead people on the voter rolls?

Yes, there are voters who have died but whose names are still on the rolls.

But claims about the number of such voters often turn out to be inaccurate.

In 2012, for example, South Carolina’s State Election Commission reviewed 207 cases that the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had referred to as potential cases of ballots being cast in the names of dead voters. Of those, the commission was able to conclude that 197 did not involve dead voters — instead, they were either clerical errors, or identified through bad matches. There wasn’t enough information on the remaining 10 cases to make any determination.

States that are members of ERIC receive reports about voters who may have died while out of state, and the service has identified about 644,000 voters who died over the last 13 years and whose names needed to be removed from the list. But some state laws may limit how states use that information.

Pennsylvania, for example, is an ERIC member, but state law allows officials to remove the names of dead voters only if they learn of it through the state’s health agency or an obituary. Election officials in the state, including Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, have advocated for that to change.

Can list maintenance measures lead to eligible voters being purged?

Yes. In Texas, some of the people removed from the rolls last year were eligible citizens who did not respond to a mailed notice seeking more information about their status, an investigation by Votebeat, The Texas Tribune, and ProPublica found.

And that’s the concern that voting rights advocates have about states that take aggressive steps to clean their lists, especially close to an election. Two of the most recent cases were in Alabama and Virginia, just before the November 2024 election.

Alabama inactivated the registrations of 2,074 eligible voters whom it had flagged as noncitizens based on whether they had been issued federal immigration ID numbers. And Virginia also removed eligible voters from its rolls as it attempted to purge noncitizens based on information from its motor vehicle department, CNN and NPR found.

This is why federal law has safeguards on when states can remove potentially ineligible voters, such as the rule that election officials cannot conduct systematic voter removals within 90 days of an election, Nott with Campaign Legal Center said.

“The more aggressive your list maintenance laws are,” she said, “the more likely you are probably going to be purging people who are eligible to vote.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

How a right-wing website’s false report figured in Louisiana’s departure from ERIC

2024-04-01T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Hi, y’all,

If you’ve been a longtime newsletter reader, you might remember a four-part series in early 2022, after Republican-led states — starting with Louisiana — began agitating against a multistate coalition dedicated to cleaning and updating voter rolls.

It all started when right-wing website Gateway Pundit falsely reported that the coalition — the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC — was inflating voter rolls to benefit Democrats.

Louisiana suspended its participation in ERIC in January 2022, and later became the first of several Republican-led states to withdraw altogether. At the time, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s spokesperson told me that the decision to quit the program was in no way related to the Gateway Pundit allegations. This seemed implausible at the time, but documents recently shared with us by the nonprofit, nonpartisan government watchdog American Oversight now show more clearly that what the spokesperson said wasn’t true.

First, let’s rewind the tape. Here is what I wrote about my February 2022 conversation with that spokesperson for this newsletter:

In late January, Louisiana suspended its participation in a multi-state voter-roll-matching program known as ERIC, one week after rightwing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit baselessly accused ERIC of being “a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up.” But if you ask Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s office, staff will tell you the decision had “nothing to do with” Gateway Pundit. What did the secretary base his decision on? The staff won’t say.
“We’re not having that dialogue,” said spokesman John Tobler, who said “numerous” experts had expressed concerns over “election stuff.” Who? “I am not at liberty to disclose that,” he said. What concerns? “We’re trying to get to the bottom of a major source of questions within the service provider” about “how the data moves and how it functions within their space,” said Tobler. What does that mean? Tobler won’t say, but he wants everyone to know “it’s not based on a conspiracy theory.

The Gateway Pundit published its first article — which falsely asserted that ERIC was funded by liberal financier George Soros — on Jan. 21, 2022. That same day, the American Oversight Records show, Ardoin texted Tobler just before 9 p.m.: “I think we suspend our membership in ERIC until we can investigate what they are doing with our data,” he wrote. “I’m fine with that,” Tobler responded.

A 2022 text message exchange between Louisiana's then-Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin and spokesman John Tobler.

Tobler then texted John McGehe, a public information officer in the secretary of state’s office: “Will you post this across all platforms? Also, call me when you get moving around in the AM about a press release.” He included a link to the Gateway Pundit article before adding that the state would be going a step further: “Apparently, we will be withdrawing from ERIC.”

A text message exchange between Tobler and John McGehe, a public information officer in the secretary of state’s office.

A few days later, after Louisiana announced its separation from ERIC in a press release, Ardoin texted Tolber and another staffer to ask which media outlets had reported the announcement. Tobler responded with a short list that included Gateway Pundit.

“What did the Gateway Pundit say?” Ardoin asked. “I am sure they went all drama on it.”

Ardoin was right. In its article announcing Louisiana’s withdrawal, which Tobler pasted into the exchange, Gateway Pundit turned up the drama as high as possible. “Today the state of Louisiana said no more — they will stop using this scandalous system,” it read.

Another exchange between Ardoin and Tobler.

Other media outlets were also unable to get straightforward, honest responses about what prompted Louisiana’s exit from ERIC.

A request from Stateline in March 2023 shows a reporter was interested in speaking to Ardoin or another staff member in the office about “why some Republican secretaries of state have decided to withdraw their states from the cooperative, and what this means for voter registration list maintenance moving forward.”

Tobler declined to comment. “Due to confidentiality provisions in the ERIC agreement that ERIC insists survive Louisiana’s membership in the compact,” he responded, “we will not be providing further comment.”

Tobler's email response to a reporter's question about states withdrawing from ERIC.

I don’t know what Tobler was talking about, and can find no record of any such insistence on confidentiality ever being communicated by ERIC to Louisiana or any of the other eight states that have left. No such requirements exist in the compact. After each of the nine states withdrew from ERIC, secretaries were provided with a list of what should remain confidential under federal law — including sensitive voter data from other states provided through ERIC. Louisiana was provided with such a document in early October of 2022. But none of these reminders prevented officials from publicly articulating a rationale for any state’s departure, or prevented any of the departing secretaries from speaking to the media.

Tobler has left the secretary of state’s office, so I contacted the current director of communications — Joel Watson — for a response. Watson said that since Ardoin and Tobler are no longer with the department, “we cannot clarify or speak to their motivations.” Tobler has not responded to an email sent to a personal email address requesting comment.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Lawmakers in Virginia briefly had an idea to keep its voter rolls updated without ERIC

2024-02-26T12:00:00+00:00

Virginia election officials continue to face a major challenge keeping their voter rolls up to date after the state withdrew last year from the data-sharing coalition ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. As Votebeat recently reported, the state has since spent tens of thousands of dollars to get access to just a sliver of data it used to get through its ERIC membership.

For a brief moment, it looked like the state might have found part of a solution — but one that apparently is now a casualty of politics and a misunderstanding.

A pair of bills, HB 565 and SB 315, would have allowed the state to automatically update a person’s voter registration if they updated their drivers license address with the DMV. It’s a simple type of change and one that has worked in other states.

Trey Grayson, former Kentucky Secretary of State and chair of the nonpartisan Secure Elections Project, was advocating on behalf of the bill. “This would be huge for Virginia,” Grayson told me late the previous week, before the bills went kaput. He said it’s particularly important now that the state has abandoned its primary sources of voter roll data. “In a lot of ways, this is better than ERIC — it requires nothing of the voter and keeps the rolls up to date seamlessly.”

Right now, when a Virginia voter updates their information with the DMV, they are asked to affirm that they also want to update their voter registration. A lot of people just hit no, not realizing their registration is out of date or just wanting to get the heck off of a DMV website. This bill, instead, allows the system to automatically detect whether a home address has been changed, and then forward that change to the state elections office, which will verify the information matches and update the record without any additional steps from the voter.

It’s not rocket science, and it’s also not that difficult to implement. Other states that have put similar programs in place have reported great success. While Colorado, for example, wired up the program as part of a larger launch of automatic voter registration, Kentucky implemented a program without one. Rather than shifting how people register to vote or their eligibility, this approach would allow two state agencies to more freely share information.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the bill was evidently a misunderstanding of what it would actually do — the word “automatic” led lawmakers and advocates to assume the bills proposed a form of automatic voter registration, a more ambitious system that registers new voters if they engage with the DMV for any reason and are eligible to be registered.

“I’ve always been frustrated by the naming of this reform,” Grayson told me.

Critics also falsely assume, Grayson says, that any interaction with the DMV, like changing the address on a vehicle registration, would update the voter registration, which Grayson’s group was trying to debunk.

Tony Franquiz, a spokesman for the Secure Elections Project, also said Republican lawmakers had been “provided with faulty info on cost and the implementation” of the bill. While estimates suggested this bill would have saved money, “diverging opinions” still existed on the “complexity and cost of implementation.”

The misinformation surrounding the legislation was probably its undoing — as was a puzzling strategy by its Democratic sponsors. Ahead of a planned vote on the measure, both sponsors of the legislation opted to table it “in exchange for a seat at the table during the interim to discuss the bill and open up a discussion on a broader automatic voter registration package,” said Franquiz. “The bill is effectively dead for this session.”

Though, he said, there is talk of a potential retreat this summer for lawmakers to discuss a AVR package.

So now, a straightforward bill that was mistaken as a form of AVR, and hindered because of it, could now get rolled into an actual AVR bill. The right flank of the GOP — as local opposition to even the word “automatic” might suggest — have been agitating against AVR across the country for quite some time. Opposition to it is a favorite talking point of right-wing think tanks and activist groups, like the Heritage Foundation and True the Vote. Republicans in Pennsylvania are, right now, suing the governor over the issue.

Democrats, who control Virginia’s legislature, may be able to pass such a bill on a party-line vote, but it’s unlikely to fly with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. I’ve reached out to Sen. Saddam Salim, who sponsored the legislation and agreed to pull it, with questions but haven’t heard back. We’ll update this on Votebeat’s website if I do.

“The reality is that it is really hard to do bipartisan election legislation right now,” Grayson told me in a text message after the bill’s demise. “Hopefully this bill starts a conversation in Virginia about how to make voter rolls more accurate and that conversation will yield some fruit in a future legislative session.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country

2024-02-12T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

On Jan. 6, 2021, as former President Donald Trump rallied his supporters, he used a statistic that, though false, was making the rounds: “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters,” he screamed, throwing his arms wide open in front of thousands of angry followers. “This is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud.”

The number appears to be the work of Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “election integrity” investigator whose research has achieved a remarkable level of national salience among the far right, despite being replete with errors. The 205,000 figure, for example, is “false” according to the Department of Justice, and was based on incomplete data the state says can’t be used for this type of analysis. Honey herself has revised the discrepancy downward. While Honey’s current estimate is almost half of what it once was, it’s still inaccurate and the original number is also still routinely cited as fact.

“There were 202,377 MORE ‘votes’ cast, than actual REAL VOTERS THAT VOTED,” reads a November 2023 post on X from a popular rightwing account. It was reposted more than 13,000 times.

Honey has been among the most effective advocates for right-wing election talking points. Time after time, her research has fed into viral allegations about election integrity, fueling conservative pressure campaigns, forcing fact-checkers and public officials to attempt to piece together a more accurate picture, and undermining confidence in long-trusted election practices. Often, her conclusions are misleading or based on incomplete information.

In the past year, working with a network of election integrity groups organized by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Honey has had perhaps the most success with her latest research: A 29-page report on the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, sent to Republican secretaries of state and legislators. Her information appears to have influenced the decision of several member states to withdraw from ERIC, an interstate program that election officials widely regard as the nation’s best tool to keep voter rolls up-to-date and free of bloat.

An analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found the report’s conclusions are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and that her sweeping generalizations are frequently not backed by the data she presents. Presented with Votebeat’s and Spotlight PA’s findings — the product of redoing her many calculations and fact-checking the analysis she has offered to public officials — Honey defended her work.

Despite how widespread her research has become, Honey described herself in emails to Votebeat and Spotlight PA as “an ordinary citizen working hard to do what I can to restore confidence in elections.”

When asked for a final comment, she accused Votebeat of “slander” and personal attacks. “Who is pressuring you to write this hit piece? What is your goal?”

The way that Honey relies on real-but-incomplete data is a hallmark of those who spread misinformation, experts say.

“The fundamental misconception people have about misinformation is that misinformation is about the facts in front of you,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies mis- and disinformation. Instead, Caulfield said, popular misinformation often relies on leaving out crucial details.

Calling it “misrepresented evidence,” Caulfield likened Honey’s report to a prosecutor accurately telling a jury that they discovered a murder weapon in a suspect’s possession but failing to mention that the fingerprints on it belonged to someone else.

“You can’t look at that and say, ‘The knife is real, we found the knife,’ but not look at it and mention you found fingerprints that would undermine the importance of the evidence,” he said.

Activated by 2020

As Honey tells her own origin story, she was standing in line at her polling place in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 3, 2020, behind an older couple when her journey to election integrity investigator began.

“It really kind of struck me that, you know, this woman who just waited in line for an hour was told ‘oh, you have to cast a provisional ballot,’” Honey said on Mitchell’s “Who’s Counting” podcast in May 2022. She told Mitchell she wondered if the provisional would be rejected. “So it just got me a little bit worked up and I went home and I started doing, I mean, what I do.”

Honey has operated Haystack Investigations — a private investigations and supply-chain auditing consultancy — since 2017, her LinkedIn profile shows. Her website offers services ranging from supply chain audits to social media investigations.

Using what she’s described as “open-source investigation” skills, Honey began researching Pennsylvania’s election laws and requesting data from the Pennsylvania Department of State in November 2020. Soon after, she decided to reach out to her state representative, Frank Ryan, a Republican, with her findings.

“I said ‘look, here are the things that I found,’” she told Mitchell. One of those things was “that there were more ballots reported than what we found in the voter files.”

Honey told Mitchell that Ryan gathered other representatives together to show them her work — that is, a calculation purporting to show a discrepancy between the number of ballots cast in the 2020 election and the number of people the Pennsylvania roll recorded as having voted.

Ryan did not respond to an interview request, though Mitchell’s version closely mirrors his public telling of events, and emails — on which Honey is included — show Ryan passed this information onto U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican who was in close contact with Trump at the time. According to the final report of the January 6 committee, Trump would repeat the claim that Pennsylvania had more votes than voters numerous times, which was part of the Department of Justice indictment against him alleging election interference.

Honey told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that Ryan was receiving information from multiple sources at the time, but she did not directly dispute that Trump’s figures originated with her work.

Honey’s latest calculation of the discrepancy, revised after straggling counties uploaded fresher records, sits at around 121,000. Trump cited that number, and Honey’s work directly, in a document he released in January claiming fraud in swing states in 2020.

Still, election administrators in Pennsylvania say this number is based on a flawed analysis.

Voter roll data is constantly updated to account for moves, deaths, and other issues of eligibility, which stops in the weeks just before an election and resumes again immediately after, the Department of State and county election directors explained. The roll also does not contain information about some voters whose identity must legally be kept confidential, such as victims of abuse. In other words, the state’s voter roll at any one point in time doesn’t reflect a complete record of who voted in the last election. But Honey’s analysis treats the roll as if it does.

For example, if a voter in Philadelphia moved to New Jersey the day after the 2020 election, the Philadelphia Board of Elections would cancel their registration. And even though they legitimately cast a ballot in Philadelphia on Election Day, their voter history would not appear in the voter roll system after that because they have been removed from the rolls.

Given these limitations, the Department of State told Votebeat and Spotlight PA, Honey’s method of analysis is “not an accurate way to reconcile votes cast to the number of voters who participated in any individual election” and that the system “was not intended” for this purpose. The state pushed back on the figure at the time, but that didn’t stop it from spreading.

As Honey’s research gained traction, other election-integrity advocates began to take notice and solicit her for work. She was paid as a subcontractor in Arizona for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by that state’s Senate to investigate the 2020 election in Maricopa County. That investigation ultimately did not prove any fraud. Documents from it — obtained by American Oversight and the Arizona Republic — show she was a “manager” and billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work, though it is unclear how much she was eventually paid.

Cyber Ninjas subsequently went out of business, but Honey’s work continued.

Days before the 2022 midterm elections, Honey released a report — through her election integrity research organization, Verity Vote — claiming nearly a quarter of a million ballots in Pennsylvania had been sent to “unverified” voters. Rep. Ryan again picked up the information in a letter to the Department of State. It was then echoed by Trump, and conservative website the Gateway Pundit pointed to it as evidence that the election was fraudulent and should be decertified.

The report “flagrantly misrepresents” how the system works, the Department of State — which rebutted it after it gained traction online — said at the time. Voters were labeled as “NV” or “not verified” in the state’s voter management system, but as the Associated Press reported, the label is for internal workflow purposes and typically means the identification provided by the voter is still being verified by county workers so their ballots can be counted.

A more refined ERIC criticism

In 2022, as ERIC became the subject of right-wing fury, Honey began her own research.

ERIC was created in 2012 by seven original member states with assistance from the Pew Charitable Trusts. It continues to be governed by member states and uses state voter rolls, death records, motor vehicle records, and other information to cross-check state voter rolls for accuracy. It also identifies voters who may be eligible to vote but unregistered — referred to as EBUs — and requires states to reach out to those potential voters about registering.

ERIC does not add or remove any voters itself. It only provides lists of voters to states, and states and counties then verify the accuracy of ERIC information before they remove voters from the rolls. Voters who register in response to the outreach must meet all voter registration requirements.

By June 2022, ERIC had grown to include 33 states and the District of Columbia. Prior to conservative attacks — including those fueled by Honey’s research — it drew bipartisan praise from officials for its ability to help clean voter rolls, including from some of those same officials who would take up Honey’s talking points.

In January 2022, an article from the right-wing outlet the Gateway Pundit accused ERIC of being “a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up.” Louisiana soon after announced it was suspending its membership. Officials told Votebeat at the time the decision was unrelated to the coverage but that “numerous” experts on “election stuff” had advised the state to leave ERIC, office spokesman John Tobler said.

Louisiana would be the only state to part with the program for several months after the Gateway Pundit’s story was published. In the interim, Honey released her report, offering apparent backing to the charges laid out by the site.

While it reached many of the same conclusions as the Gateway Pundit, Honey’s report offered a more professionalized critique of ERIC with historical research, original first-hand documentation, and data analysis. It appears to have contributed to Virginia, Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana withdrawing from the compact, as well as North Carolina’s decision to halt its process of joining.

Flaws and omissions in Honey’s ERIC report

In June 2022, Mitchell — a conservative attorney who represented Trump in Georgia in 2020 — hosted a conference in Washington, D.C. There, Honey gave a presentation on ERIC to several secretaries of state or their representatives, according to information obtained by Documented, a D.C.-based investigative news outlet, and provided to Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Mitchell did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

At the same time, Honey released her ERIC report on her website.

The report repeatedly asserts misleading claims. For example, she writes “after 10 years of ERIC, there is no evidence that it has led to an improvement in accuracy or clean voter rolls.” She attempts to prove that by comparing the number of voter roll removals in ERIC states vs. non-ERIC states. That comparison, however, relies entirely on a single metric — the number of removals in one category released in one year.

She claims that her research — using data released bi-annually by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — shows that ERIC states removed proportionally fewer voters who had moved out of their voting districts than non-ERIC states had in the same time period.

Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT who studies elections and works with EAC data, says the data shouldn’t be used in this way. It is often unreliable because it contains gaps and basic mathematical errors, and sometimes doesn’t match what states independently report. Stewart is a member of ERIC’s Research Advisory Board, which advises the organization on how it can measure its performance. He also disagreed with the premise of Honey’s analysis, since ERIC is not responsible for removing any voter from the voter rolls and ERIC member states are “at the mercy” of local jurisdictions like counties that actually act on the data ERIC provides.

But the data can provide a rough measure of ERIC’s performance. Using data available to Honey at the time of her report, Votebeat and Spotlight PA repeated her analysis and found that the conclusion of her report is misleading. She appears to have chosen the singular datapoint that supported her claim, out of a series of voter-removal metrics in the same data set. And, despite the availability of multiple years of such data, Honey used only one — 2020, an outlier year. Taken together, Honey left out 11 of 12 relevant data points in her report.

Votebeat’s and Spotlight PA’s analysis, which used all 12 data points available at the time her report was published, suggests exactly the opposite: ERIC states remove a higher percentage of voters from the rolls than non-ERIC states. Data from a more recent year — 2022 — also supports that conclusion.

(Read more about Votebeat’s analysis below the story.)

Asked to explain her selective use of data, Honey did not respond to some questions and offered answers to others that contradict the logic of her analysis. For example, asked to explain why she only used a single metric from one year, Honey said in an email that it would be inappropriate to analyze one of the other categories — removal of voters who died — in state-to-state comparisons, since some states, like Pennsylvania, do not use ERIC’s death data. But Honey’s analysis has the same flaw, as not all ERIC member states use ERIC’s moved-voter data uniformly, either.

Honey did not address why she only analyzed the EAC’s data from one year, when four were available at the time she published her report.

Elsewhere in the report, Honey claims that the outreach to eligible but unregistered residents, or EBUs, that ERIC requires member states to conduct “results in significant swelling of voter rolls,” and that “EBU additions consistently exceed suggested removals by ten times.”

But available data doesn’t support Honey’s conclusions.

“The report is obsessed with EBUs,” Stewart said. “I just take, overall, the report as part of building the case that ERIC is this left wing organization that is trying to get Democrats onto the voter rolls.”

To conclude additions exceed removals by “ten times,” Honey shows a graph of data from ERIC’s website. The wording of the title of the graph calls these “additions and removals instigated by ERIC participation,” as though all of the numbers displayed are actual voters removed from or added to rolls. But ERIC only supplies information about voters who may need to be removed or are eligible to register to vote — state and county election offices determine which are valid and make any changes themselves. In the case of eligible but unregistered voters, the state simply sends a mailer to the identified person informing them of their eligibility, and the voter must take action from there. Honey acknowledges elsewhere in the report that removal and eligible-voter data ERIC provides to states are merely “suggest[ions].”

Her graph also leaves out two other categories of ERIC’s list maintenance recommendations to states. In reality, they’ve recommended roughly 41 million records be updated and identified roughly 57 million voters who may be eligible.

Votebeat performed a more accurate analysis of ERIC’s effect on voter roll additions, using data showing net changes to voter rolls, rather than the number of people who were sent mail.

The EAC’s data — which Honey uses elsewhere in her report, though not for this analysis — shows that there is typically less than 1 percentage point of difference between ERIC and non-ERIC states when it comes to registering new voters.

This figure aligns with academic research on the topic. A study of Pennsylvania’s ERIC mailings, published in 2020, found they resulted in only a 1 percentage point increase in registration.

Elsewhere, Honey’s report relies on real data to make inaccurate conclusions or omits relevant and readily-available context.

For instance, she accurately states that Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s secretaries of state received voter outreach grants from nonprofits dispersing money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Honey then incorrectly claims the grants were given to those states “in order to gain access to data needed to inflate the Democrat voter rolls and drive Democrat turnout.” Honey did not respond to a request to provide evidence of that claim.

The portion of Pennsylvania voters registered as Democrats went down in 2020, as it has every year for more than a decade. Michigan voters do not register by party, so there are no “Democrat voter rolls” there. And a recent study from data scientists at the University of California Los Angeles found that the areas that received grants funded by Zuckerberg saw less than a 0.13 percentage point increase in voter turnout — ultimately significantly fewer votes than would be needed to swing the election even if they all had voted for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Honey also leaves out important context. For example, she quotes a 2021 Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau report which found many duplicate and erroneous voter registrations in the file ERIC sent to that state for voters who should potentially be removed.

Honey quotes this accurately but leaves out other parts of the report that reflect positively on ERIC, such as the state elections office saying ERIC does a better job “identifying individuals whose voter registration records may need to be inactivated or who may have more than one active voter registration record” than it does. Among its conclusions, the report says the state’s voter rolls would be more accurate if it used ERIC’s data more often.

Honey said the issues addressed by the Wisconsin agency were “very different things” than what she investigated in her report, but did not elaborate on why she didn’t include the positive aspects.

Honey’s claims gain traction

Despite the flaws in Honey’s report, it quickly gained traction, making its way across conservative media and into the hands of influential politicians and officials.

“Thank you for reading through this information!” a local Virginia GOP committeewoman wrote about Honey’s report in a March 2023 email to a state representative, expressing “hope” it would be shared with the Virginia state elections board. It ultimately was.

Records obtained by Documented also show that Honey’s influence grew through the help of Mitchell. In June 2022, Mitchell organized the event for secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. Officials from Texas, Wyoming, Louisiana, and West Virginia were scheduled to attend, according to records obtained by Documented, which also show that Mitchell’s group paid for a Texas secretary of state official’s travel to the event. Records obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA show Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was out of office that day for an unspecified “meeting in DC.” Louisiana announced its official withdrawal from ERIC a month later.

As officials and activists took notice of the report, Honey’s work began to be cited by influential outlets and figures in conservative media, including The Federalist.

“Per government watchdog Verity Vote, ERIC doesn’t actually clean states’ voter rolls, but rather inflates them,” the publication wrote in March 2023, using the name of the entity through which Honey puts out her election-related research.

Her work also made appearances in a series of articles critiquing ERIC by Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at Restoration of America — a conservative Christian non-profit focused on the challenges presented by “the elite,” “Marxist neo-liberals” and “Communist China.”

And Judicial Watch, an influential conservative legal watchdog group, cited it in a white paper in March 2023. “States that do not participate in ERIC had a higher rate of identifying and removing from voter registration rolls individuals who relocated out of a jurisdiction than ERIC member states,” Judicial Watch wrote.

Policymakers took notice of the report as well.

In 2018, Ashcroft, a Republican, said the state’s membership in ERIC “will help affirm voters are eligible and registered in the right location, identify potential duplicate registrations and identify unregistered voters so we can help them get registered.”

But last February, Honey gave Ashcroft a private presentation on her report, emails obtained by Documented and Votebeat/Spotlight PA show.

A month later, Ashcroft announced Missouri’s withdrawal, saying in part that it was because ERIC was “adding names to voter rolls” — language similar to the claims in Honey’s report. Missouri’s number of registered voters increased by less than two percent in the time it was part of ERIC. The state’s Republican state auditor recently criticized Ashcroft for the decision in a report, which cited the benefit of ERIC’s data in maintaining accurate voter rolls. Ashcroft did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Honey’s report was not the sole reason any state withdrew from ERIC. No state election official — even those who met with her or received her report and appear to have adopted some of her language — explicitly cited her research. But her report and advocacy appears to have influenced several states.

In January of last year, Devvie Duke, a member of the Texas GOP and an ERIC task force, said in a Zoom meeting that she had lined up ERIC training with Heather Honey “so we can be informed and productive when we’re writing.” She paused. “Or, going to see our legislators in support of legislation getting rid of ERIC.”

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, who wrote the bill that pulled Texas out of ERIC, participated in that meeting, where he was introduced as “a regular” at the task force’s sessions.

Duke, who did not respond to a request for comment, is currently running for a seat in the Texas state House. Her campaign material claims that it was “through Devvie’s work that Texas terminated its membership” in ERIC, which she called a “liberal voter registration scheme.”

In Virginia, Susan Beals — a former Republican state Senate aide and now the commissioner for the state Department of Elections — also received the report last March from a member of the state House, according to an email obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. A letter obtained by Virginia Public Media shows that when Beals withdrew from ERIC, some of her reasoning was worded similarly to the contents of the email. Beals did not respond to a request for an interview.

Internal communications from an election integrity network in North Carolina — obtained by Documented and shared with Votebeat and Spotlight PA — show that Honey met with a group of legislators about a bill to prevent the state from joining ERIC, and also met with at least some of members of the state Senate who would later vote for the measure.

And language mirroring Honey’s research has also appeared in the capitol building of her home state, Pennsylvania, where state Sen. Cris Dush (R-Jefferson) said last March that non-ERIC states were doing a better job cleaning voter rolls than ERIC states, though he did not cite any evidence.

Dush did not respond to a request for comment.

Friends in high places, and a new frontier

Honey has certainly been successful in getting her information in front of influential officials in a way her peers have not, forming connections with secretaries of state, their staffs, state lawmakers, U.S. Senate candidates and congressmen. Her influence, therefore, is likely to continue.

For example, she recently gave a talk in Pennsylvania to the Lycoming County Republican Committee, attended by U.S. Rep. Dan Mueser, who called it an “important presentation” on “securing and protecting the voting system.” She also appears to have provided draft language for a bill in June 2021 to state Reps. Seth Grove and Russ Diamond, according to records obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.

Honey also leads a local organization, PA Fair Elections, which hosts weekly Zoom discussions on election issues and organizes activists. Recent meetings have focused on how to advocate post-election hand counts to county commissioners, though some attract public officials, including at least two state representatives, a Commonwealth Court judge, and county commissioners.

Ahead of the 2024 election, her work is expanding beyond ERIC to include research and advocacy about ballots sent to and from voters living overseas, including military voters.

In addition to authoring a report on the subject, which she published in September 2022, she filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of State, with the support of an attorney from the Thomas More Society. It alleged the department was violating federal law by not requiring identification for some overseas voters.

An attorney for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office, who handled the complaint, dismissed it in November, offering that the complaint was more of an objection to federal law rather than an accusation that existing law was being violated. Honey is now appealing that decision to Commonwealth Court.

She’s also exporting this advocacy to states outside the commonwealth. In August, she gave a presentation on overseas voters to the Virginia coalition affiliated with Mitchell’s election integrity network, according to records reviewed by Documented.

A now-deleted post from the North Carolina–based Asheville Tea Party, whom Honey worked with to contact legislators in that state, shows that she also gave a presentation in April on military and overseas voters at the request of Mitchell.

Meeting notes posted to the Asheville Tea Party’s website indicate Honey explained that her concern was that while people assume the ballots are from military voters, most of them come from overseas citizens, many of whom were likely unverified.

“These newer election officials just rubber-stamp them and don’t do anything to verify,” she said, according to meeting notes. “It’s the non-military that we need to really worry about.”

Honey’s work focused on influencing local election policy also continues.

At the first PA Fair Elections meeting of the year, Honey kicked off the meeting by talking about what changes members needed to push for in their counties, including pressuring election offices to conduct their required post-election audit — a recount of 2% of all ballots — by hand count. It is currently done with a mix of hand counting and machine tabulation.

“There are 104 days till the primary, so these things we are talking about, we are very much hoping to have them in place for the primary so we can work out any kinks,” she told the group of roughly four dozen. “If we can roll them out in the primary, we can hopefully make improvements to them by the general.”

Clarification, Feb. 12, 2024: The story has been updated to clarify Pew Chartable Trusts’ role in the launch of ERIC.

Graphics and data analysis for this story were done using data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey. Specifically, state-level data on the number of reported registrations, voting age population, overall removals, removals due to voter death, removals due to voter moving out of jurisdiction, and new valid registrations were extracted from the 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 datasets. EAVS data should be used and viewed with caution, as it is a voluntary survey and often incomplete or inaccurate.

Data on overall removals, removals due to voter death, removals due to voter moving out of jurisdiction, and new valid registrations was then grouped by each state’s ERIC membership status for a given report period. Those figures were then divided by the aggregate reported registrations for the group of states. Reported registrations are the actual number of registered voters a given jurisdiction reports in response to the survey. The voting age population is an estimate of the number of persons eligible to vote, based on census data.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Jason Armesto — a reporter for The Daily Progress, a newspaper in Virginia — contributed to this report.

Documents show Republican-led states struggling to clean voter rolls after leaving ERIC

2023-12-13T14:15:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Some Republican-led states are struggling to develop new ways to adequately update their voter rolls after withdrawing from a popular cross-state voter roll cleaning program that came under attack by far-right election activists, according to new documents and internal emails reviewed by Votebeat.

Virginia paid $29,000 in September to regain access to just a sliver of the data they used to obtain via the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. Alabama and Missouri officials took months to come up with new plans for cleaning voter rolls, landing on plans that are less rigorous than ERIC. And a new system some states are considering to help with voter roll cleanup had its server attacked and temporarily brought down, according to documents obtained by left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight and exclusively shared with Votebeat.

The documents also show that senior advisors to secretaries of state in Missouri and Texas recognized that lies were being spread about ERIC, and tried to stop their states from withdrawing from what they saw as a valuable program. In addition, officials in some states such as Ohio had pushed unsuccessfully for changes to ERIC that could have kept their states from withdrawing.*

“As you know, I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this,” Amanda Grandjean, then the senior advisor to the Ohio secretary of state, wrote in an email to ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin after Ohio withdrew from the program in March.

ERIC is a powerful tool for states to share voter information with other states, allowing them to remove duplicate or dead voters from their rolls. It has been successful mainly because of the sheer volume of the data it collects, which allows it to accurately match voter data on a large scale, and because it has worked through the complications involved in cross-referencing the different data sets and storing and transmitting the data securely.

Before the exodus of members began in early 2022, more than half of U.S. states were participating, and membership was virtually balanced between Republican- and Democratic-led states.

Clean voter rolls help ensure that eligible voters only cast one ballot, and help counties keep mail voting costs down by eliminating ineligible voters from the rolls. As states leave ERIC, not only do they lose access to the collective’s valuable data themselves, their withdrawal means the remaining states have less data with which to clean their own rolls. Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researches voter roll maintenance, said this may not only undermine confidence in elections, but also could cause problems for voters at the polls whose addresses may not be up-to-date after they move, sometimes requiring them to cast a provisional ballot.

“Inaccurate rolls to me are an integrity problem,” Morse said. “But, they are also an access problem.”

The nine Republican states that have left since 2022 can’t replicate this type of system, and are instead taking a piecemeal approach that leaves them contending with a series of challenges, the documents show. For example, a working group involving several states led by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office wrestled this spring with the legality and security of data-sharing across state lines, according to emails among state officials.

In the margins of a draft agreement, an official noted they weren’t sure whether some states permitted confidential voter data to be shared in the way proposed. “Do other states’ laws allow this?” the comment read.

Hamlin, the executive director of ERIC, told Votebeat that its founding states worked for more than two years to build ERIC and “ensure what we do and how we do it complies with state and federal laws,” he said in a statement. “We also made sure data privacy and security were built into our processes and practices from the beginning.”

So far, instead of a multi-state agreement, states have instead signed individual agreements with other states.

West Virginia, for example, has signed agreements with Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee — states likely to have residents moving between them and West Virginia. West Virginia is not attempting to replace ERIC, but primarily trying to identify potentially illegal voting activity across state lines, said Donald Kersey, general counsel for the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office.

Kersey said in an email that it hasn’t been complicated.

“It naturally required states to work with each other to find time to meet and review the [memorandums of understanding], but it has been no more complicated than other MOUs our office works on with other entities or state agencies,” he wrote. Kersey said the creation of a multi-state agreement wasn’t the sole mission of the Ohio-led working group, instead describing it as “part of the discussion,” and said the state is also using other sources of data to clean its voter rolls as needed.

States were advised of ERIC’s value

The exodus from ERIC began after the far-right website The Gateway Pundit published articles in January 2022 laden with false information about the program: That it had been funded by left-wing financier George Soros and that it was run by virulent partisans who sought to pad voter rolls with liberal voters.

None of that was true, and prior to the onslaught of coverage the program was considered apolitical: A cross-partisan team of officials from member states run the program, and it’s funded out of those states’ budgets. Along with attempting to match duplicate voters across state lines, the states use the data they receive from ERIC to inform new residents of their state that they are eligible to vote. The dual purpose of the program was what initially attracted both Democratic- and Republican-led states.

When the Gateway Pundit’s articles were published, election offices across the country began to get emails from constituents demanding they leave the program. Soon, Republican secretaries of state who had long been proponents of ERIC in the past changed their tune.

Documents show that their top advisors knew that the Gateway Pundit stories were false.

The day after the first article was published on Gateway Pundit’s site, ERIC’s executive director emailed officials in ERIC member states attempting to debunk it.

“I appreciate you sharing this and will advise the Secretary,” Trish Vincent, chief of staff for Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, wrote back to Hamlin. “He has gotten some inquiries related to this horrible and misleading article.”

But in early March 2023, Ashcroft withdrew Missouri from ERIC, making it the third state to leave the program after Louisiana and Alabama. Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, and Virginia left next.

Texas was the most recent. There, too, internal emails from the Secretary of State’s Office show that officials there knew that leaving ERIC would be costly and inefficient.

When a chief of staff for a North Texas Republican state lawmaker reached out to Sam Taylor, the assistant secretary of state for communications for Secretary of State Jane Nelson, in January asking him for information about ERIC, Taylor responded with a long email explaining the importance of the program.

Taylor explained that from June to December 2022 alone, ERIC provided the office with information that led to more than 200,000 deceased or duplicate voter records being flagged for county voter registrars to investigate. He also corrected some of the inaccuracies in the Gateway Pundit story, explaining, for example, that ERIC isn’t funded by Soros.

Taylor called ERIC an “important election integrity tool,” and said without it, counties wouldn’t be able to remove certain voters from the rolls, “creating the opportunity for criminals to commit fraud in the name of a deceased person or a person who no longer lives in Texas but is still registered here.”

Nonetheless, Texas left ERIC in July.

Taylor, who no longer works for the secretary of state, told Votebeat in a text message Monday that, while ERIC was the best tool states had for cross-state voter roll cleanup, the program became less effective due to the multi-state exodus.

“And whatever new system takes its place will likely face similar scrutiny surrounding transparency, accuracy, and efficacy in helping keep voter rolls clean and up-to-date,” he said.

Some states that withdrew cited financial concerns. States spent between $37,000 and $174,000 for annual membership for the most recent fiscal year, depending on their size. But the mailings required by the program cost states as well, and the membership fees are growing as states back out of the program and fewer remain to share the burden.

But any other system may be expensive, too. In a fiscal note obtained by American Oversight for the legislation that allowed Texas to withdraw from the program, the Texas’ Secretary of State’s Office estimated that any cost savings the state would see from leaving ERIC, which cost the state $1.5 million every two years, would be “offset by the costs of participating in a different program or in developing a new program.”

Christina Adkins, elections director for the Secretary of State’s Office, estimated the office would continue to need the $1.5 million every two years for any new system it used to clean voter rolls.

Virginia has already found that getting the data that ERIC provided is costly.

In August, the state paid $3,445 just to get access to the national database that uses Social Security numbers to report deaths, the Limited Access Death Master File, and the next month the state paid $28,960 for a private company to match the files to the Virginia voter roll, one of the many services ERIC previously provided, according to receipts obtained by American Oversight. Membership to ERIC cost Virginia about $40,000 in annual dues for 2019-2020, according to a state document. The dues have since risen, but more recent data wasn’t immediately available.

States left ERIC without a replacement plan

The documents show that, in many cases, states that left ERIC didn’t have a long-term plan to replace it. At least some also lacked short-term plans for keeping voter rolls up-to-date in the meantime.

In Alabama, for example, Secretary of State Wes Allen ran his 2022 campaign for the office on a platform of removing the state from ERIC. He announced the state’s exit from ERIC immediately after taking office in January. Yet two months later, the state’s elections director was just starting to figure out how to replace it.

On March 27, Jeff Elrod sent an email to an official with the National Association of State Election Directors asking for contact information for the best person at the U.S. Postal Service to get change-of-address data for voter roll maintenance, something ERIC had provided the state.

Ashcroft withdrew Missouri from ERIC in March, though it appears the state’s counties received no formal guidance for months as to how they should now perform voter roll list maintenance without it. On June 7, the elections director of Saint Louis County wrote indicating he’d received the new guide, and asking for an electronic version of it to use for staff training.

Meanwhile, Missouri has joined other states who have departed ERIC in forming a working group to establish a new way to share voter data across state lines. As of this spring, the group was wrestling with both the legal and practical challenges around obtaining and sharing necessary data, and trading tips on possible sources for it while attempting to hammer out a draft template for agreements between states, a June email from Grandjean in Ohio to officials in the group shows.

In addition to questions about whether laws in all the states would allow confidential voter information to be shared and how, working group members also weren’t sure how often the states could commit to sharing data with each other. A draft agreement circulating at the time suggested every six months, with a note that said “Discuss.” That’s much less frequent than ERIC, which requires data sharing at least every 60 days, though it’s up to individual states how often they use the available data to update voter rolls.

Grandjean also touched on the cybersecurity questions around how data would be shared.

“We also decided that there needs to be a dedicated group of CISOs/cybersecurity professionals from our offices connected via email to discuss the secure data sharing requirements” she wrote, updating the group about a June meeting.

Lawmakers and advocates have suggested some private vendors as replacements for ERIC, but those have also faced security challenges: One private vendor marketing itself as a voter roll cleanup solution across state lines, EagleAI, faced a cyberattack in October, according to the documents.

Columbia County in Georgia recently signed up to use the system. In October, EagleAI CEO John “Rick” Richards Jr. responded to concerns from the county, including a claim that the EagleAI system had been hacked.

On Oct. 4, Richards confirmed via email that “several EagleAI network servers became inoperative,” adding that “investigation indicated it was possibly due to an attack on the Windows server software.”

In an email to Votebeat, he denied that the event — which he characterized as a “denial of service attack” — put any voter data at risk.

“Denial of service attacks happen all the time, hundreds and even thousands of times a day,” Richards wrote. “There was no breech[sic] of the EagleAI software.”

Morse said it’s not surprising to him that states are laboring to find substitutes for ERIC. ERIC took a long time to create, he said, and reflects a careful design that takes into consideration state and federal laws, as well as secure and accurate sharing of private data.

“The states withdrawing from ERIC cannot just easily stand up a copycat,” he said. “I don’t expect anyone to stand up a copycat. What I expect is for people to stand up a cheap imitation that will ultimately be worse.”

Correction, Dec. 13, 2023: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the context of the email Amanda Grandjean, then the senior advisor to the Ohio secretary of state, sent to ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin after Ohio withdrew from the program. After this article published, Grandjean told Votebeat the email, which said, “As you know, I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this,” referenced her advocacy for changes to ERIC’s requirements that might have prevented Ohio’s withdrawal. The email did not directly acknowledge that lies were being spread about ERIC.

Votebeat journalists Natalia Contreras, Carrie Levine, and Carter Walker contributed to this report.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Texas resigns from ERIC, a national program that keeps voter rolls updated

2023-07-20T19:26:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The Texas secretary of state submitted its exit notice Thursday to a national coalition that is one of the best tools to combat voter fraud, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Votebeat.

The withdrawal from the program comes after Republican leaders pushed the effort and approved legislation to stop using the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a program 27 states use to check duplicate voter registrations and clean voter rolls. The campaign to withdraw was underway among members of the Texas Republican Party and Republican lawmakers for more than a year but was rooted in misinformation and election conspiracy theories.

According to the secretary of state’s resignation letter, the state’s exit will be effective in three months, in accordance with the program’s bylaws. By then, a law approved by the Texas Legislature this session, authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, will have gone into effect. That legislation directs the secretary of state to build its own version of a multistate cross-check program or to find a “private sector provider” with a cost that won’t exceed $100,000. Hughes did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Alicia Pierce, the secretary of state’s spokesperson, said the state could not stay in ERIC because it must now comply with the requirements in the Hughes legislation. She also pointed to previous exits from the coalition by eight other Republican-led states since 2022: Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, Iowa and Virginia, all of which faced similar political pressure.

“As fewer states are participating, the costs are increasing and the amount of data we’re going to receive will be reduced,” Pierce said.

Nonetheless, Texas law still requires the state to participate in a multistate data-sharing program to clean its voter rolls, which is what led the state to join ERIC in 2020. When the state stops using ERIC in October, it will be in violation of that requirement unless it finds an acceptable substitute, which won’t be easy.

Pierce told Votebeat the secretary of state’s office is still researching options.

The push to leave ERIC in Texas began more than a year ago and was based on misinformation spread by right-wing activists and conservative media that falsely said the program is led by left-wing activists, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups. Among other allegations, they falsely claimed ERIC is seeking to give Democrats an advantage.

Experts told Votebeat there is no viable alternative to ERIC right now. Some private firms are attempting to sell services to compete with it, but those likely won’t be as effective or accurate without the access to data that only state officials can obtain. Efforts to replicate the program will be costly and could take years to develop.

Texas counties update their voter rolls year-round, and additional data provided by ERIC helped them identify voters who have moved in and out of state and voters who have died. Last year, the program helped the state identify at least 100,000 in-state duplicate voters and another 100,000 duplicates of people who moved in or out of state that were sent to counties to investigate.

ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin said in a statement regarding Texas’ withdrawal that the program will “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”

State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin, said the announcement Thursday was frustrating because ERIC is an effective tool.

“The GOP push to get out of ERIC shows they’re not committed to safe and accurate elections as they claim, but instead are committed to placating extremists in their party that perpetuate the big lie,” Bucy said in a text message.

Bucy successfully added two amendments to Hughes’ bill to withdraw from ERIC in an effort to add some “guardrails” to the law. Those provisions require that a new system used by the secretary of state complies with the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and all state and federal laws relating to the protection of personal information. Private vendors must do a background check for each employee of the system.

Voting rights advocates say the withdrawal is “dangerous and unnecessary.”

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager at Common Cause, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights and government accountability, said the state’s chief elections officer should instead be “making it easier to exercise our right to vote.”

“Deploying partisan tactics like this only stands to scare people away from the ballot box and doesn’t do anything to strengthen the security of our state’s elections,” she said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Texas set to withdraw from ERIC after final legislative approval

2023-05-24T00:09:10+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Update, June 1, 2023: The Texas House and Senate approved the final version of the bill during the closing days of the legislative session. It is now headed to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

The Texas House of Representatives gave crucial approval on Tuesday to a Republican-backed effort rooted in conspiracy theories that would remove the state from a national coalition that helps prevent voter fraud.

Senate Bill 1070, authored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, was approved by the House on a 85-61 vote. The bill would allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a multistate program used for checking duplicate voter registrations and cleaning voter rolls. The bill is now headed back to the Senate for approval of changes proposed by Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, that would add requirements to comply with federal and state privacy guidelines if an alternative system is contracted by the state.

ERIC, considered by election administration experts across the country to be the best tool for preventing double voting across state lines, has been a target of viral conspiracy theories spread since early last year by a fringe conservative publication, The Gateway Pundit. The nonpartisan program compares voter registration rolls from all its member states, along with other data, to flag voters who have died, moved away, or registered elsewhere so that states can remove outdated registrations from their rolls.

Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, spoke against the bill Tuesday and said it was concerning to see the Texas Legislature take such action based on a conspiracy theory.

“That’s why I don’t understand why we have this bill before us, particularly when we know the data shows that ERIC has helped Texas identify duplicate registrations, and that’s exactly what we should be trying to do,” Turner said.

Right-wing activists and conservative media have falsely said that the program is led by left-wing activists, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros, and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups seeking to give Democrats an advantage, among other allegations. Since last year, eight Republican-run member states — most recently Virginia — have announced their withdrawals, apparently due to political pressure.

In a written statement to Votebeat, ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin said the program has provided the Texas secretary of state with reports identifying more than 900,000 out-of-date or inaccurate voter records. “Consistent with ERIC’s mission, these reports enhanced Texas’ ability to maintain accurate voter rolls,” Hamlin said Tuesday. “ERIC will continue to support Texas’ active use of its membership.”

In Texas, an “ERIC task force” was created more than a year ago by members of the Texas GOP, ignited by those same viral false claims. The task force was spearheaded by the party’s vice chair, Dana Myers, and Alan Vera, then the Harris County GOP ballot security chair. Vera, an influential activist who spent decades raising questions about voter fraud and is also known for challenging thousands of voter registrations in Harris County, drafted language for a bill and submitted it to Hughes’ staff in January. A month later, Hughes and Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, filed bills incorporating the suggestions from Vera and the task force.

Vera died at the Capitol earlier this month, moments before he was scheduled to testify on election legislation. Jetton on Monday renamed SB 1070 “The Alan Vera Memorial Act.”

Texas law requires the state to participate in a multistate data-sharing program to clean its voter rolls, and the state has been a member of ERIC since 2020. The Texas Legislature budgets about $1.5 million to participate in the program. About $115,000 of those funds pay for annual fees to use ERIC’s voter-matching data. The rest of the funds go to paying for postage, mailing, and printing costs to send notices to residents ERIC identifies as eligible voters who are not yet registered, an effort the program requires of its member states.

Members of the ERIC task force argued the state was spending too much money on the program and suggested Texas could instead use private-sector alternatives. Members of the ERIC task force also pushed for the state to stop spending funds on such mailers for eligible voters.

Hughes’ bill directs the secretary of state to build its own version of a multistate cross-check program or to find a “private sector provider” with a cost that won’t exceed $100,000.

In March, the secretary of state announced it was taking steps to build its own version of the program and researching viable options in the private sector. Votebeat reported those efforts could stall or take years.

The bill nonetheless requires such a system to identify voters whose addresses have changed, who have died, or who are ineligible to vote, including because they have been convicted of a felony. Lastly, the bill also requires that a contract with the private sector provider “may not require any additional duty of the state” that isn’t listed in the legislation — such as the mailers to unregistered but eligible voters that ERIC requires its member states to send.

Bucy proposed changes to the bill that election policy experts say are “guardrails” on systems that could potentially replace the program.

Bucy’s amendment strikes language in the bill that seeks to identify “voters who have been convicted of a felony; and who are not eligible to vote including a felony conviction” and changes it to “voters who are ineligible” under the state Election Code. The amendment also now requires any system the state uses to comply with federal and state laws relating to the protection of personal information.

The changes, which would have to be approved by the Senate before the bill goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, also say the secretary of state may not contract with a private-sector system unless the contractor requires a background check for its employees. Such a system must also use data from the National Change of Address database to screen for voters who have moved.

“Adding that extra component of verification beyond whatever this mystery vendor might provide is probably a good change,” said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA, who added that the requirements could help with the state obtaining more accurate information. “But the question is now whether the Senate will accept those amendments.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

After a setback, a GOP effort to pull Texas out of a multi-state program to clean voter rolls could move forward

2023-05-17T23:20:47+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A Texas House Democrat used procedural tactics this week to delay a vote on legislation pushed by right-wing believers in voter fraud and based on an election conspiracy theory, though the measure could yet move forward.

Senate Bill 1070 was set to allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a multistate coalition used by dozens of states for flagging duplicate voter registrations and cleaning voter rolls.

The ERIC program, considered by election administration experts across the country as the best tool for preventing double-voting across state lines, has been a target of viral conspiracy theories spread since early last year by a fringe conservative publication, the Gateway Pundit. The nonpartisan program compares voter registration rolls from all its member states, along with other data, to flag voters who have died, moved away or registered elsewhere, so that states can remove outdated registrations from their rolls.

Right-wing activists and conservative media falsely say the program is led by left-wing advocates, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros, and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups seeking to give Democrats an advantage, among other allegations. Since last year, eight Republican-run member states — most recently Virginia, on Friday — have announced withdrawals from the program, apparently due to political pressure.

The Texas bill’s surprising setback came after the legislation had been in the works for more than a year and had picked up momentum through both chambers. The bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Jacey Jetton, a Republican, asked Tuesday to delay a vote on it until after the regular session ends later this month following a point of order – a procedural tactic used to delay or kill legislation– that was raised by state Rep. Mihaela Plesa, D-Dallas.

On Wednesday, after a series of procedural moves, the bill was sent back to the House Elections Committee, which again approved it hours after it was received.

The bill is now headed back to the House chamber to be considered for a vote. The Texas Legislature is scheduled to end May 29.

Neither Jetton nor the bill’s Senate author, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, responded to requests for comment.

In Texas, the movement against ERIC was led by members of the Texas Republican Party in April 2022. Party Vice Chair Dana Myers and Alan Vera, a longtime voter fraud activist and then the Harris County GOP ballot security chair, led the “ERIC task force.” In January, they announced they had drafted a bill and submitted it to Hughes’ staff; he filed Senate Bill 1070 the following month. (Vera died May 4 at the Texas Capitol moments before he was set to testify on election legislation.)

Plesa’s point of order was based on the grounds that the bill analysis, documents filed to explain the purpose and costs associated with legislation, was “materially misleading.”

Plesa told Votebeat she found language in the bill analysis to be vague and “without merit,” singling out a sentence that says “some say the costs associated with ERIC participation have outweighed the benefits.”

“Who is saying this? What costs? This statement is not a reasonable inference based on other verified statements,” Plesa said. “We’re running safe and secure elections in the state of Texas, and it’s very concerning to me that we’re looking at removing our state from this database program and this is coming on the heels of so many other red states leaving this program.”

Plesa said Democrats in the House are prepared to fight attempts to resurrect the ERIC legislation.

“We’ve just got to keep our good eyes on [the bills] and make sure that any reconsideration of this bill is met with objection, and that we’re ready to call more points of order and to get them on record as to what exactly they’re trying to do with removing the state of Texas from ERIC,” she said.

Texas law requires the state to participate in a multistate information-sharing program to clean its voter rolls. The state budgets $1.5 million annually for costs associated with ERIC: about $115,000 for its membership dues and the rest for postage, mailing, and printing costs to send notices to residents whom ERIC identifies as eligible voters who are not yet registered, an effort the program requires of its member states.

In March, after Hughes filed his bill, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced it was taking steps to develop the state’s own program. The state’s former elections director, Keith Ingram, was reassigned to “develop and manage” the new system. Votebeat reported that such an effort could stall or take years to put together. Election and voter registration experts say a viable alternative to ERIC does not exist.

Two weeks ago, Hughes told members of the GOP, including those on the ERIC task force, that the development effort by the secretary of state’s office was “moving pretty fast” and that he was optimistic the legislation would pass.

“But even before that takes effect Sept. 1, even before that, we may already have the new Texas system in place,” he said during a weekly Zoom call.

Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state, declined to comment on Hughes’ characterization of the timeline. Pierce said Friday that the office was ready to comply if the proposal becomes law.

A recent poll conducted for Secure Democracy, a nonprofit that advocates for election and voting access policy, by Chris Perkins, a Texas-based researcher with the political polling and research company Ragnar, found that Republican voters in Texas support the program.

Researchers surveyed 750 Republican primary voters across the state in April and found that 84% of Texas Republican voters want Texas to remain a member of ERIC to keep voter rolls clean.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat and covers election administration and voting access in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

These state officials praised ERIC for years before suddenly pulling out of the program

2023-04-11T21:31:42+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Dig deeper into how your vote gets counted in our free newsletter.

When newly elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked off a series of election security reforms in 2019, he said, “protecting the integrity of Florida’s elections” was one of his “top priorities.” In addition to giving $2 million to local election offices to shore up defenses and initiating a review of all 67 counties’ cyber practices, he also that year announced that Florida was joining the Electronic Registration Information Center — an obscure nonprofit that would help the massive state clean its voter roll and reach out to eligible but unregistered voters.

“We want to make sure that the voter rolls are accurate, and one of the best ways to do that, I think, is for Florida to join the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC,” DeSantis said at an August 2019 news conference.

So, starting the following year, Florida shared motor vehicle and voter registration data with ERIC. Using similar data from states across the country, ERIC produced a list of people who were registered in Florida but had moved, died, or otherwise rendered themselves ineligible to vote in the state. It also provided Florida with a list of people who were eligible to vote but had not registered.

The state received its first tranche of data from ERIC ahead of the 2020 election, using it to reach out to more than 2 million eligible but unregistered voters. DeSantis enjoys bragging that Republican registration caught up to Democrats for the very first time during his tenure. Then, in 2021, counties began to use ERIC data to remove thousands of registered voters who’d moved out of state or died.

In 2022, DeSantis announced an entire police force dedicated to solving election crimes. The newly-assembled squad told the media it received much of its information on double voting and ineligible registrations from ERIC. Last month, for example, a man in Pinellas County was arrested and charged with a felony for allegedly casting two ballots in the 2020 election after ERIC flagged him.

The same day the arrest was made, DeSantis announced Florida would leave the program.

Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio have also announced their exits, and Iowa’s secretary of state has said he’ll ask the Legislature to end the state’s participation. Texas is widely expected to be next in line. Like DeSantis, officials and Republican activists in each state had previously and recently praised the program.

DeSantis’s office didn’t respond to questions from Votebeat about the state’s sudden pivot, instead referring Votebeat to the Office of Secretary of State Cord Byrd. A spokesperson for Byrd responded with a link to an interview Byrd had given to One American News Network, a right-wing news outlet, about the decision to leave ERIC.

In the interview, Byrd said “nothing stops” Florida from continuing to share information with other states “who value voter integrity.” While it’s true Florida can continue to negotiate individual data-sharing agreements with each state in the country, experts widely agree there is no program as robust as ERIC. The office declined to comment further, and DeSantis’ office said it wouldn’t answer any questions.

“You will get whatever comment we decide to provide and nothing more,” wrote Jeremy Redfern, a DeSantis spokesperson.

The clearest explanation for these states’ reversal is the unrelenting campaign against ERIC, begun by a fringe publication, The Gateway Pundit, in early 2022. Louisiana was the first state to withdraw, shortly after the coverage began. Then, the storyline spun out.

“Last year The Gateway Pundit reported on the ERIC Systems in a series of articles and follow-up reports for over a year now,” Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft wrote last month. “These articles have gone viral and are being passed on to state officials.”

Across the country, local Republican groups began demanding answers about ERIC, and powerful local activists began to insist their elected officials leave the program. These demands have grown so loud that many who once sang the praises of ERIC can no longer resist turning on it.

For example, Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit, recently released a scathing notice calling ERIC “a syndicate founded by leftists.” They did so despite having previously agreed to a settlement in their lawsuit against the state of Kentucky over its bloated voter rolls in 2018 which required Kentucky to join ERIC.

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, so it is essential that dead and long-gone voters be removed from voter registration lists,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a press release after Kentucky announced it would remove thousands of people from the rolls, thanks to information it received from the program.

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft routinely touted his outreach to unregistered but eligible voters, attributing the data to ERIC. “The benefits of ERIC include increasing the number of registered eligible voters and ensuring voters have a smooth process on election day,” he said in 2018. Still, last month he said he “came to the realization” that ERIC’s operations, including its focus on voter registration, raised concerns.

In an interview, Ashcroft acknowledged that ERIC helped his state clean its voter rolls, but said that his concerns about partisanship, the influence of non-voting board members, and concerns over what he characterized as insufficient data provided by the program.

He said he had “no idea” what Gateway Pundit had written last year about ERIC.

“I don’t tend to read Gateway Pundit,” he said.

Ashcroft has been interviewed by Gateway Pundit, and Gateway Pundit personally called for Ashcroft to leave ERIC, publishing letters from advocacy groups. The website, at least, believes its outreach worked.

“Our message is resonating,” reads an article published last month. “In early March, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft notified The Gateway Pundit that Missouri was cutting ties with ERIC.”

Ashcroft confirmed to Votebeat he’d notified Gateway Pundit ahead even of notifying ERIC of his state’s departure. He nonetheless maintained that the publication had no influence on his decision.

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner took to the media in 2018 to praise the “long overdue” cleaning of the state’s voter rolls — something only possible because of the state’s recent entry into ERIC. Since his decision to pull out of ERIC in March, Warner’s staff have privately expressed disbelief about the move to their counterparts in other states and have acknowledged there is no factual basis for the departure, three officials who have participated in the conversations confirmed to Votebeat.

Warner’s spokesperson, Landon Palmer, declined to comment on the nature of the disagreement between Warner and his staff.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has repeatedly bragged about Ohio’s participation in ERIC, and has sent out multiple press releases announcing recommended prosecution for voter fraud based on data provided by the program.

“One of the big reasons voter fraud is so rare is because states are stepping up to enforce the law whenever it is broken,” he said in a 2019 recommendation that 18 voters in Ohio be prosecuted for voting twice — information obtained via ERIC.

LaRose ended Ohio’s participation only a month after telling NPR that ERIC was “one of the best” tools to fight voter fraud.

LaRose’s spokesperson, Rob Nichols, claimed LaRose had been unsatisfied and seeking change within ERIC for nearly nine months. None of the nearly two dozen people interviewed for this story remembered any advocacy by LaRose prior to this year. Despite Votebeat’s repeated requests, Nichols provided no documentation of the secretary’s months-long efforts, which he said had failed because “outside influences sabotaged our office’s efforts.”

Similarly, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate told NPR that ERIC was “a godsend.” In late 2019, he referred nine Iowa voters to county attorneys for prosecution for double voting, data his office had obtained from ERIC.

“One fraudulent vote is too many. It nullifies a legally cast vote,” Pate said then. “Iowans take the integrity of our elections very seriously and we will not stand for people trying to cheat the system.”

The calculus behind a stance against ERIC may be different for many of these officials in 2023. Ashcroft announced a bid to run for governor in Missouri last week. Warner is running for governor in West Virginia. LaRose is considering a bid for the U.S. Senate. And DeSantis is now widely considered a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

Conflict over ERIC leaves swath of consequences

Experts say the choice to leave will result in dirtier voter rolls in all of these states, something Republicans have so far treated as an anathema. It will also mean ERIC is less effective for the states that remain. Departing states will no longer share information with ERIC about people who move to or die in their states — an especially harmful step when taken by population centers such as Florida, a destination for retirees.

Officials from other member states who have participated in the tense meetings over ERIC’s future in the last month say that officials in every departing state privately acknowledge their voter rolls will suffer as a result. The increasingly uncomfortable politics of the thing, more than any specific policy difference, explains their departures, those remaining officials say.

At the last board meeting, on March 17, members voted on a collection of changes to ERIC’s bylaws that had been proposed by Republican states, led by Ohio’s LaRose. Among other things, he wanted to remove ex-officio members from the board and make ERIC’s requirement that states reach out to unregistered voters optional. Only his proposal about ex-officio members passed, and Ohio and Iowa announced their departures shortly afterward.

Those who voted against the changes were unapologetic and even angry at the states who’d made the requests.

“It’s like we had a gun to our head: do what our base wants because they believe lies, or we’re out,” said a person who attended the meeting and asked not to be named talking about the discussions, which are closed to the public. “It was like they just wanted us to bow down to the same people who’d threatened us, harassed us and made our lives hell for the last three years.”

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state and a Republican, tried to bridge the divide between the two groups, offering a compromise measure he told Votebeat he hoped would “provide common ground in hopes we could keep as many states as possible.” That measure also failed.

Raffensperger, who has faced intense harassment and criticism since resisting former President Donald Trump’s demand to find him “more votes” in 2020, says he has no plans to leave ERIC. “The more Republican states you have in there, it’s more likely you have changes Republicans want. You have a seat at the table,” he said. “Their voter rolls won’t be as clean as Georgia’s.”

The day Ohio announced it would leave the program, Raffensperger tweeted a GIF of children’s character Spongebob Squarepants punching himself in the face. “States claim they want to combat illegal voting & clean voter rolls - but then leave the best & only group capable of detecting double voting across state lines, @ericstates_info,” he tweeted. The states who’d pulled out had “hurt their own state & others while undermining voter confidence.”

Withdrawal reasons don’t stand up to facts

States departing ERIC have alleged ERIC has committed a series of offenses. Among the main charges: An early relationship with a nonprofit they accuse of being left leaning, alleged influence by a “hyperpartisan individual,” giving inappropriate access to voter data to other liberal activists, mass-registering voters across the country to the benefit of Democrats, and ERIC’s requirements that states do voter outreach as part of their participation.

But those objections — a mix of true and untrue claims — are all conveniently recent, even though little about the program has changed. Prior to Gateway Pundit’s coverage and the ensuing viral misinformation, ERIC’s origins were already known by member states and the public — at least, the members of the public who were interested in something so arcane. Requirements for voter outreach were widely popular, and ERIC’s bylaws spell out data access and security measures, none of which had previously been criticized by the conservative states eager to join the program.

ERIC was created in 2012 by seven original members states with assistance from the Pew Charitable Trusts — a nonpartisan nonprofit — which Gateway Pundit and others have falsely claimed is heavily funded by liberal mega donor George Soros.* In reality, the Open Society Foundation, which Soros owns, gave a one-time contribution of half a million dollars to Pew for voting-rights work unrelated to ERIC that took place from 2009 to 2011. The sum makes up a small fraction of the more than $300 million a year Pew brings in annually.

Pew is no longer affiliated with ERIC, which became member-led shortly after it was launched with the initial seven states. It remains managed and funded directly by the member states that share data with it, though Pew provided a grant for technology upgrades in 2019.

Even states that have left the program while criticizing the affiliation and partisan lean had publicly acknowledged the affiliation for years.

An explanation of the program on the Missouri Secretary of State’s website, which as of this writing is still live, says ERIC was “formed in 2012 with assistance from The Pew Charitable Trusts.”

Rick Scott, who preceded DeSantis as governor of Florida and now represents the state in the Senate, resisted joining the program while in office as a result of the Pew connection. In 2019, after DeSantis announced Florida would join ERIC, Scott spokesperson Chris Hartline told Politico the former governor hadn’t done the same because he “did not believe it was right to share the personal information of every Florida voter with a liberal think tank.” It was the first time he’d offered an explanation, albeit a misleading one, of his resistance to the program, which he was repeatedly asked about by local media and election officials.

But aside from Scott’s relatively quiet objections, few others expressed alarm about ERIC’s early connection to Pew. Membership ticked up every year, with enrollment largely evenly split between red and blue states. Newspapers and community groups in states that hadn’t joined demanded to know why their state wasn’t dedicated to cleaning up the rolls.

“If Alabama can join such an endeavor, one using readily available technology to make voting easier, why can’t Kansas?” read a 2016 editorial from the Salina Journal.

Texas joined in 2020 after the Legislature funded the effort. A group of “Texas grassroots political leaders” wrote a letter in 2018 demanding the state join, citing a state law that requires participation in an interstate data exchange to clean voter rolls. “Based on information we’ve gathered, we have every reason to believe this law is being ignored by the Secretary of State’s Office,” they wrote. “If there are persons who are dually registered to vote in Texas and another state, and these persons have voted in Texas elections, this is just one more way our constitutionally guaranteed civil rights are being violated.”

Since its founding, ERIC says it has found nearly 11.5 million voters registered in more than one state.

Conspiracy theories cast founder as left-wing activist

Accusations around ERIC’s partisanship have largely centered on one man: David Becker, the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Becker helped create ERIC while he was with Pew, prior to starting CEIR, and until a few weeks ago was an ex-officio board member for ERIC.

In 2020, CEIR helped distribute millions of dollars to state elections offices that had been donated by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to shore up local voting resources as a global pandemic raged.

Labeling the money “Zuckerbucks,” even mainstream Republicans falsely claimed the donations swung the election for Biden. A Federal Election Commission investigation would later conclude there was “no indication that [Chan and Zuckerberg] coordinated with any candidate or committee,” and the nonprofit that distributed the bulk of the money, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, said grants were awarded to every election jurisdiction that chose to apply.

Regardless, Gateway Pundit alleged that the affiliation between Becker and ERIC meant “left wing activists created ERIC to clean voter rolls their way, using their rules.” The publication also alleged Becker had personal access to the data ERIC held, and used it to register Democrats across the country.

Both ERIC and Becker say that’s not what happened.

They say CEIR received limited, largely anonymized data that specific states directed ERIC to send because they had joined a CEIR-led effort to test the effectiveness of the states’ voter outreach.

“CEIR signed an [non-disclosure agreement] with the states and gave them specific instructions to ensure that no sensitive data was included,” Becker said. “It’s important to note that this was all done with the consent and under the instructions of the states that chose to participate in the study, which we’re finalizing for release in the next few months.”

The states’ outreach to these voters — consistent with ERIC’s requirements — consisted of a postcard with instructions on how to register.

For his part, Shane Hamlin, executive director of ERIC, said that the data Becker received did not come directly from ERIC but from the member states themselves. “Only authorized ERIC employees have access to ERIC’s servers or the data on the servers,” he said. “This has always been the case.”

Neither Becker nor ERIC had direct access to voter roll management systems in any state, something that is routinely confirmed in state reports on ERIC and by ERIC itself, making it impossible for the program or Becker to directly add new voters to the rolls. While on the board, Becker had no vote over ERIC’s policies or direction, and could have been removed from his position at any time by member states.

Still, nearly every state that has exited has cited Becker — named or otherwise — as a reason.

Missouri’s Ashcroft, for example, said a “hyper-partisan individual” was serving as an ex-officio member of the board. Becker was the only such member. Similar concerns were articulated by Alabama, West Virginia, Ohio and Iowa.

In an interview, Ashcroft said he began expressing concerns about Becker as early as last summer, and had asked him to leave the board at that time but that Becker “became highly partisan, and refused to leave the board.”

Becker denies this.

“I haven’t spoken to Jay Ashcroft in years, if I’ve ever spoken to him at all. He has never tried to contact me. He never asked me to resign from the board,” he said. “If he wants to ever speak to me, even just to tell me to go to hell, I would welcome the conversation.”

Asked about Ashcroft’s concerns, ERIC board members from three states could not remember him participating in meetings about ERIC at all prior to Gateway Pundit’s coverage. No one recalled an effort to remove Becker from the board last summer. In his interview with Votebeat last week, Ashcroft insisted that the March 17 vote to remove ex-officio board members had failed. It had passed.

States that have left ERIC citing Becker’s involvement have previously contracted with CEIR and with Becker himself. The same states also scrambled to apply for the “Zuckerbucks” they now criticize: Florida received nearly $300,000. Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio each received more than $1 million.

CEIR released a letter in March signed by nearly 30 conservatives in support of Becker and detailed Becker’s bipartisanship. “He began working at the Department of Justice Voting Section in 1998, during the Clinton administration, and continued until 2005, working twice as long in the W. Bush administration,” they wrote, noting that the Bush DOJ had “awarded Becker the Civil Rights Division’s highest honor for a career attorney – the Special Commendation for Merit.”

Anti-ERIC movement grew despite officials’ defenses

The turbulence means an uncertain future for ERIC. At each point of the crisis, beginning with Louisiana’s pause in membership, those involved assumed the bleeding had stopped. At each point, they were incorrect.

Louisiana had been the first state to leave, shortly after the Gateway Pundit articles were published in January 2022. The office didn’t offer any specific reasoning for pausing and then withdrawing from the program, nor has it since. At the time, spokesman John Tobler would only tell Votebeat that “numerous” experts had expressed concerns over “election stuff.” He declined to name them, or detail their concerns.

“I am not at liberty to disclose that,” he said.

The decision seemed so abrupt and ill-informed that the election officials and experts who pay close attention largely assumed it was a one-off problem. But right-wing publications and activists praised Ardoin for his choice. “Louisiana is the first and only one yet to terminate its relationship with ERIC due to serious security concerns regarding ERIC’s management of voter registration information,” wrote the founder of Gateway Pundit in August 2022.

Gateway Pundit wouldn’t have to limit its praise for long.

Wes Allen, who was at the time running for secretary of state in Alabama to replace John Merrill, also a Republican, was campaigning on exiting the program. He was elected in November, and withdrew as one of his first acts in office.

Merrill has been vocally opposed to the move since Allen first announced his views, refuting the claims that have tainted ERIC’s reputation. “Nothing has ever happened. Nothing’s ever been documented. Only these failed claims that have been introduced without any empirical data to back it up whatsoever,” Merrill told Votebeat last month. “Why would you want to eliminate this? That tool has helped us be in a position to prosecute those people who have violated the trust and confidence of the process.”

Now that multiple other large, Republican-leaning states have joined Louisiana and Alabama, remaining participants are concerned that states will begin only sharing information with their politically like-minded counterparts — something that would make everyone’s voter rolls dirtier and yet another sign that even arcane aspects of election administration are now partisan.

“It’s not just red states we want to share this information with,” said Raffensperger. “I want to know that they’ve registered in what you’d call a blue state. The more member states, the better everyone’s data is going to be.”

He’s concerned that states that have yet to join ERIC may resist joining given the controversy, or because the program will become less valuable and may no longer be worth the hassle if more high-profile states exit.

California’s secretary of state’s office, which has been considering membership in ERIC for years, told Votebeat any decisions made “won’t be influenced by obvious disinformation. We’ll make our decision based on what’s best for California voters.”

In the meantime, states that have departed or are considering it have said they’ll seek an alternative to the program, so as to not sacrifice the cleanliness of rolls. Texas, for example, demoted its election director, Keith Ingram, and kept him on the state’s payroll to facilitate the creation of such an alternative. Experts widely agree this is a long shot.

“It’s self-defeating to leave ERIC,” said Steve Simon, secretary of state for Minnesota. “There is no current alternative to ERIC and there won’t be for a long time.”

Raffensperger said that, in theory, he’d be willing to join other programs in addition to ERIC, but “they aren’t available right now, and I’m living in the present,” he said. “You have to stand up for the truth, and you have to stand up for the facts. We are standing up for ERIC.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Correction, April 14, 2023: This article originally stated that ERIC was created by the Pew Charitable Trusts. It was created by the initial member states with assistance from Pew.

Texas may be about to scrap a voting security system it can’t replace

2023-03-28T09:58:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

With some Texas Republicans pushing the state to abandon one its best tools for preventing voter fraud — a coalition of states that share voting roll data to weed out duplicate and suspicious registrations — the secretary of state’s office is trying to discern if it can build a replacement.

But the effort could easily stall or take years, experts say. Similar efforts in other states over the past two decades have not worked, or have been shut down, because they lacked bipartisan support from multiple states and access to the kind of national data that produces accurate cross-state voter list matching — all of which the Electronic Information Registration Center, or ERIC,spent years developing.

The push to have Texas become the latest state to withdraw from ERIC, a long-standing effort by nearly 30 states, is rooted in a yearlong misinformation campaign that spread through right-wing media platforms and advocacy groups.

If the state decides to leave the program but fails to produce a similar tool, Texas’ voter rolls will inevitably be less accurate, which could fuel claims of voter fraud, experts say. That could increase costs for counties who’d be more likely to send election mailers to voters who have moved out of state or died, because outdated information would linger on the voter rolls. And the state, too, would spend more than it would save by leaving the program because it would need to build the technical infrastructure and meet the federal security requirements needed to protect sensitive data in order to make an alternative viable.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, declined to comment on the feasibility of developing a new alternative to ERIC. He told Votebeat, however, that at least Georgia and Nevada — states that are currently members of ERIC and supportive of the program — and Oklahoma have expressed interest in working with Texas on the project. Taylor said research is also underway on the cost of developing such a system.

In no small part, experts note, the coalition ERIC built over many years worked, because member states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — agreed to come together in a good-faith effort to share the necessary data and information to help maintain voter rolls across state lines. But in recent months, political pressure on Republican-led states has put the coalition at risk. Last year, Louisiana, then Alabama, followed by Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, and most recently Ohio and Iowa, announced they would depart. Texas could be next: The Texas Legislature is already considering various bills to leave ERIC.

And the state’s attempt at replacing the program both would not be an efficient solution and could have implications for the states that remain in ERIC by making it harder for states to join together across party lines, said Marc Meredith, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration. Meredith has also done research on voter list maintenance.

“It would be incredibly disappointing to end up with basically two versions of the same thing because the value of data grows exponentially as you can make more and more comparisons between states,” he said, and added that by leaving the program, Texas will deprive itself of all the other states’ data while preventing the other states from obtaining data on more than 16 million registered voters in the state. “It’s not like if you split the world and have 25 states in one [program] and 25 states in another, [it] would be equally good. It’s actually more than double the bad.”

Creating an ERIC alternative would be expensive and difficult

The secretary of state’s office announced this month that it removed its longtime elections director, Keith Ingram, from his position and directed him to create and manage Texas’ own “interstate voter registration crosscheck program.” Christina Adkins, the office’s legal director, became the state’s acting elections director.

The abrupt announcement of Ingram’s new task came on the tail of a push by members of the Texas GOP, including lawmakers, to get out of ERIC. Recent objections in other states have centered on concerns about how the program is run and data privacy.

Ingram himself, who was Texas’ representative on the ERIC board and one of the state election officials who run the program, has defended it. He last year addressed the false claims and told the group of Republicans that no alternatives to ERIC existed. Nevertheless, the GOP created a task force to get Texas out of ERIC and added it to the party’s legislative priorities. Republican legislators who were involved in the effort from the start filed bills this session in the House and Senate to get it done.

Texas’ current law requires the state to participate in a multistate information sharing program to clean its voter rolls. Experts say there is no equivalent alternative to ERIC right now, though some private firms are attempting to sell their services to compete with it; those likely won’t be as effective or accurate without the access to data that only state officials can obtain.

ERIC launched in 2012 after a bipartisan coalition of state and local election officials came together to brainstorm a more efficient and cost-effective way to clean the voter rolls and identify voters across state lines who have moved or died. The goal was also to get eligible but unregistered voters on the rolls by notifying them well ahead of busy election cycles, when counties would have to spend more resources registering new voters on deadline. The coalition began with seven states and grew to more than 30 by 2022. There has been no evidence of irregularities or security breaches since its founding.

The program is successful because state election officials, who run the program and serve as its board members — Adkins now represents Texas — have to agree on rules and regulations to provide and receive access to data, including security protocols governing how that data is shared. Some state legislatures also have to pass laws to allow their participation in the program in order to allocate funding and to set provisions about who can and cannot legally access such data. All of this happened over many years.

As the program matured, it also obtained certification from the U.S. Postal Service, which helps ERIC validate and verify voters’ address changes. It also solidified a relationship with the federal agencies that provide other information to ensure accurate matches, such as Social Security death data. These yearslong developments enabled ERIC to achieve a level of sophistication that would be difficult for an alternative program.

“In theory, someone could try to stand up a copycat of ERIC,” said Michael Morse, a political scientist and fellow at the University of Chicago Law School who has done research with Meredith about voting list maintenance systems. Most recently, Morse’s research focused on ERIC. “But to me, it is highly unlikely that anyone could meet all the necessary privacy and security requirements for confidential data to actually get it done, in addition to any necessary state legislative authorization.”

Non-ERIC member states would also require funding to set up the technical infrastructure needed to protect the data, maintain subscriptions to national databases and meet costly federal data-handling requirements, which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Texas currently pays about $115,000 for its yearly ERIC dues. It also budgets more than $1 million on mailing, postage and printing costs associated with inviting eligible voters to register, something required under the ERIC membership agreement that several states are now attempting to change.

Since ERIC is run by its member states, it has access to motor vehicle data, which no one other than state and federal agencies can access. Having that information is key for accurate cross-state voter roll maintenance, and another reason why ERIC is so effective and difficult to replicate, Morse said.

Previous efforts have failed because state voter registration lists alone generally don’t have enough unique information to distinguish individuals across the country. A lot of people share the same first name, last name and date of birth. ERIC uses confidential motor vehicle department records that allow the program to recover partial Social Security numbers for voter registrations that don’t have that information, supplementing it.

This makes ERIC a much more accurate tool than, say, the now-defunct Crosscheck, a precursor program created by Kansas, because it provides more unique data about each voter, improving the accuracy of matches across data sets, Morse said.

In 2013, the early days of ERIC, Joe Gloria was the registrar of voters in Clark County, home to Las Vegas. He was one of the first election officials who used ERIC as a tool to clean voter rolls, something that took a lot of work and resources in his famously transient jurisdiction, said Gloria, now the executive officer of operations for the National Association of Election Officials. As ERIC matured and more states joined, especially those neighboring Nevada, such as Arizona, Utah and Oregon, Clark County started seeing more benefits.

For example, the county spent less on sending election mailers to in-state inactive voters, or to voters who had moved out of state or died. “It cost approximately $1.25 for every mailer that we sent. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you multiply it by more than 70,000 people, that’s a great cost to the constituents in Clark County,” Gloria said.

The voter rolls are public, so anyone can request or inspect them. Activists who do their own data matching work in an effort to police for potential voter fraud could find misleading indications of wrongdoing if the voter rolls include murky or outdated data, experts say. Clean rolls are “good for the integrity of the election process,” Gloria said.

Past efforts to cross-check voter rolls without ERIC have failed

Before ERIC was established, 30 states used the Kansas-based Crosscheck program, created in 2005 by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which let states compare their voter rolls at no cost. But it lacked data security measures and the expansive national databases — and motor vehicle data — needed to provide accurate results.

By 2017, Crosscheck data matching was under fire as unreliable because it used only publicly available information such as names, dates of birth — which many people share — and voting history. States began to leave the program, and lawsuits over data breaches and vulnerabilities forced it to shut down.

Instead, states joined ERIC. But years before the most recent conspiracy theories about ERIC went viral, one state opposed using it and tried to go its own route. Indiana’s failed attempt to create an alternative program for voter roll matching foreshadows the challenges that lie ahead for Texas.

In 2017, voting rights groups sued Indiana for enacting a law that allowed the state to use Crosscheck data to remove voters from the voter rolls without notifying them first, which a judge ruled was a violation of federal voting rights law. The judge also blocked use of Crosscheck in Indiana after the voting rights groups argued the program was too unreliable to use it to remove voters from the rolls.

As a result, Indiana lawmakers in 2020 passed an election law that not only prohibited Indiana from using Crosscheck but from joining any program like it, including ERIC.

Some Indiana lawmakers at the time opposed joining ERIC because of data sharing security concerns. In addition, they said the program was too costly, and they had concerns about ERIC’s early connections to the Pew Charitable Trust, a nonpartisan think tank that helped seed ERIC’s creation before it was taken over by its member states.

“ERIC was somehow bad because some people here characterized Pew as this ultraliberal foundation funding all of this ultraliberal and crazy stuff,” said Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana. The organization was a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state in 2017.

The law prohibits Indiana from joining a system that requires a payment to obtain voter registration information from another state or that requires funds to “engage in activities other than list maintenance” as a condition for receiving voter registration data from other states. ERIC requires its member states to send notifications to eligible but unregistered voters explaining how they can sign up.

The law also allowed the Indiana secretary of state to build the state’s own version of Crosscheck, using only information publicly found on voter registration lists, such as first and last names and dates of birth, which have been proven to produce unreliable matches. The law, again, allows counties to immediately remove people from the rolls identified by its program, dubbed IDEA, which stands for Indiana Data Enhancement Association. But that program was never fully developed. Instead, it was blocked by a judge who reaffirmed the 2017 ruling that had found such matches would be unreliable.

That leaves Indiana with neither its own cross-state voter data sharing program nor the ability to join ERIC.

“[IDEA] was a political stunt. And our voter rolls continue to need attention,” Vaughn said. “We gave up on trying to convince [Indiana state officials] to join ERIC a long time ago. They proactively said, ‘We don’t want anything to do with this.’ And we’ve got other fights to take on here. And now nobody’s paying attention to the issue.”

The Indiana secretary of state’s office and the bill’s author, state Sen. Greg Walker, declined to comment.

A cautionary tale

Texas, like Indiana, could be forced to withdraw from ERIC before a viable alternative is in place if pending legislation passes.

Two bills, one by state Sen. Bob Hall and another by state Rep. Steve Toth, both Republicans, would specifically prohibit the state from using ERIC.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes’ bill would require the secretary of state to stop using ERIC if it can find a “private sector data” alternative with a price cap of $100,000 that could identify voters who have been convicted of a felony. Some voter fraud activists in Texas have suggested the state use a program dubbed Omega4America, initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is known for spreading election conspiracy theories. The program’s creator, Jay Valentine, has been doing presentations about the program in people’s backyards.

According to a letter posted on the Omega4America website, Valentine claims he has examined voter rolls in more than 30 states and that “ERIC is failing to clean voter rolls, and the number of fake people and fake addresses in the voter rolls is large enough to change election outcomes in every state we examined.”

Meredith said Omega4America is promoting faster computing, but if it doesn’t have access to motor vehicle department data, much like Crosscheck, its results won’t be reliable.

The bill by Hughes would also prevent the secretary of state’s office from sharing information that isn’t found in voter registration lists. Morse said it’s unclear whether Hughes’ bill means that Texas will only be allowed to share information that’s already publicly available or if it’ll be allowed to also share motor vehicle data, which is what results in the most accurate cross-state matches. Hughes did not respond to Votebeat’s request for clarification.

“This would authorize the secretary of state to leave ERIC potentially for a solution that seems set up to fail,” Morse said.

Voter fraud activists in Texas have for years claimed fraud due to dirty voter rolls, even though there’s no evidence to support those claims. They have proactively requested copies of the voter registration lists, which are public, from county election offices, and have used them to challenge the legitimacy of voters. Over the past year, some of these activist groups have knocked on people’s doors across Texas counties to verify voters’ addresses and sent postcards attempting the same.

The voter registration system is tied to residential addresses, and every day, everywhere in the country, people move and change their address. That means our voter rolls are constantly out of date, but that does not necessarily lead to fraud, Morse said.

To now say that ERIC doesn’t work, and to instead use alternatives created by “vigilante list maintenance groups” that operate much like Crosscheck, with publicly available but incomplete data, “is all but designed to promote the narrative of fraud,” Morse said. “Because it’s not reliable enough.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access in Texas for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Conspiracy theorists may not have won office, but baseless accusations still have power

2023-03-27T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

“Election Denial Didn’t Play as Well as Republicans Hoped,” the New York Times headline announced on Nov. 9 last year, pointing out that candidates promoting election conspiracy theories in battleground states had largely lost their races. Other headlines ran along the same lines. “Election deniers overwhelmingly lost in battleground states” and “‘This movement was rejected’: Republican election deniers lose key state races.”

Those headlines are, of course, correct, and those candidates did indeed lose, suggesting the candidates’ support for election conspiracy theories didn’t win support from the general electorate.

But the recent decision by several Republican-led states to withdraw from a multistate coalition dedicated to cleaning and updating voter rolls shows how allegations of a tilted election playing field can still roil at least some voters. It’s clear that baseless allegations about the mechanics of elections are still circulating, and they’re powerful enough to shape events — and keep affecting our elections.

The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, was a previously obscure nonpartisan coalition created more than a decade ago to help states clean their voter rolls by sharing data across state lines. At Votebeat, we’ve written about it repeatedly, in no small part because it’s been the subject of baseless conspiracy theories and other misinformation for more than a year.

Those stories, and reporting in other outlets, have pointed out the lack of evidence behind allegations that ERIC is funded by liberal megadonor George Soros and it improperly shares data with progressive groups. But it’s also important to pause and think about what the decisions to withdraw by Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Iowa tell us.

Officials in those states cited a mix of data privacy concern and a failed push for changes to the group’s bylaws that, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in the letter announcing Ohio’s withdrawal, would bolster confidence in ERIC and make it more bipartisan. Some Republicans, though, are among ERIC’s staunchest defenders. “Reacting to disinformation they’ve hurt their own state & others while undermining voter confidence,” tweeted Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on March 7, throwing in an animated shot of children’s character Spongebob Squarepants punching himself in the face.

Some of the critics’ concerns and proposed changes are reasonable enough.

But it’s hard to miss that one reason for dwindling confidence in ERIC is a deliberate campaign to weaken it. And the people encouraging and celebrating states’ withdrawals have been those with histories of spreading inaccurate information about elections, including True the Vote, Audit the Vote PA, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and former President Donald Trump, who inaccurately described ERIC as a system that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”

So where does this leave us? Maybe with a sense that election conspiracy theories may not have the power to win statewide office for most candidates who promote them, but they do persist and do still have power. In the case of ERIC, they’re still coloring the debate — and still shaping events.

Back Then

ERIC wasn’t always so controversial.

The Obama Administration’s Presidential Commission on Election Administration endorsed the use of the program in its final report, released in 2014. And then, shortly after, the Republican National Lawyers Association also endorsed it. In a statement about the report, RNLA President Craig Burkhardt said, “PCEA suggests many good reforms for the election administration process. For example, its recommendations in areas such as voter registration and list maintenance would go a long way to reduce fraud and long lines in our election process. I’m glad the President’s former lawyer co-chaired the effort and helped author the PECA report – which document recognizes by inclusion that tasks such as list maintenance are not forms of voter suppression.”

In Other Voting News

The Arizona Supreme Court declined to hear GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s challenge of her election loss, though it did order a lower court to review one count alleging that Maricopa County did not follow signature verification procedures, the Arizona Republic reported.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, signed a dozen election bills into law, including a ban on absentee drop boxes and requirements for post-election audits and public tests of tabulation equipment within 10 days of an election, Kelo reported.

A group of plaintiffs including the NAACP sued Florida over a so-called “wet signature” requirement they allege creates a higher burden for voters of color, elderly, and low-income residents who may not have easy access to printers. The requirement bans digital signatures, and similar lawsuits are pending in Texas and Georgia, the New York Times reported.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin will no longer allow some residents convicted of felonies to automatically have their voting rights restored, reversing a practice put in place by previous governors. The change in practice has the potential to greatly reduce the number of people who regain the right to vote, the Washington Post reported.

The U.S. House Administration Committee will go ahead with a planned hearing on Luzerne County’s 2022 ballot paper shortage, even though county officials have said they will not attend, the Sunday Dispatch reports.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

States’ withdrawals weaken ERIC and show conspiracy theories taking deep root

2023-03-13T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

Good morning,

A campaign of unfounded conspiracy theories against a multistate coalition that aids in cleaning voter rolls came to a head this week as three Republican-led states announced they would withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.

The decision by West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri to follow Louisiana and Alabama out of ERIC weakens the group, which functions as a clearinghouse for states to compare data and ensure only eligible voters remain on their rolls.

The process is strengthened by having more states contribute to the effort, which means that ironically, election integrity activists are undercutting one of the strongest safeguards against voter fraud election officials have available.

The campaign against ERIC has involved baseless allegations the group is funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros. It isn’t, and the charge is instead based on an attenuated fact chain. Opponents of the program, which is hailed by a bipartisan group of experts and election officials who vouch for its effectiveness, also say it has a leftist agenda, but offer little to no evidence. Republican election officials are some of the program’s staunchest defenders.

For more than a year, Votebeat has written extensively about the campaign against ERIC, which is an effective technological tool for state officials who use it, but the program doesn’t control state voter rolls. Withdrawing from it will leave states with fewer tools to uncover voters who have moved or died and should no longer be on the rolls, creating more opportunities for the voter fraud that critics say they are worried about. The program’s diminished membership also will result in less outreach to eligible voters who haven’t yet registered.

This week, Votebeat Texas reporter Natalia Contreras dove deeply into the campaign against ERIC in Texas, a state that is still a member of ERIC — but for how much longer? Contreras found a lengthy campaign by activists systematically targeting Texas’ participation in the program, even though state officials have attempted to reassure them about its security and usefulness. Similar campaigns are underway in other states.

The truth is, ERIC is run — and funded — by member states. It was started by a bipartisan group of state officials and received early funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a national nonpartisan nonprofit.

If you’re looking for reliable information, start with Votebeat’s past coverage:

Back Then

The Texas Legislature in 2015 required that Texas become part of a multistate voter registration data sharing program. Back then, the only such program was called “Crosscheck.” It had a lot of problems. Run jointly by the secretaries of state for Kansas and Arkansas, it matched voter rolls by first name, last name, and birth date. Turns out, that’s not at all accurate enough to produce solid matches. In addition, they were swapping passwords over plain text email, and states were handing out Social Security numbers to random members of the public. Oops! Anyway, Crosscheck doesn’t exist anymore. What does that leave? ERIC. That’s it. And they don’t send passwords over email.

New From Votebeat

From Votebeat Arizona: Why Arizona’s attorney general is suing Cochise County for giving its recorder control over elections

From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Republican senator’s record on elections has Democrats, voting advocates worried passing reform will be difficult

From Votebeat Texas: Conspiracy theory whirlwind threatens to blow Texas out of national program that keeps voter rolls updated

In Other Voting News

A new tranche of messages released as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News shows more extensively that many inside the network doubted claims of voter fraud or malfeasance during the 2020 presidential election but continued to air such claims, the New York Times reported.
As part of a censure agreement in Colorado, Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who represented former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election, admitted she knowingly misrepresented facts when making public claims about voter fraud leading to Trump’s defeat in the election. Her admissions were made to resolve professional misconduct claims brought by the bar association, the New York Times reported.
In a majority of 10 cases where local officials declined to certify 2022 election results, authorities ultimately took no punitive action, ProPublica reported.
Law enforcement officers parsed through sometimes unclear election laws in policing drop box observers in Arizona, measuring their distance from drop boxes and defusing tension with humor, according to new video footage obtained by the Washington Post.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Conspiracy theory whirlwind threatens to blow Texas out of national program that keeps voter rolls updated

2023-03-09T22:23:04+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

In virtual meetings taking place over a year, right-wing activists and Republican legislators have stoked concern over a multistate coalition that Texas and more than 30 other states use to help clean voter rolls. The majority of their grievances — that it is run by left-wing voter registration activists and funded by George Soros, among other things — were pulled straight from a far-right conspiracy website and are baseless.

Now, lawmakers who regularly attend those meetings have introduced legislation written by the group that would end Texas’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC.

The bills were introduced despite the efforts of Texas’s elections director, who attended a meeting and offered factual information related to their concerns last April, apparently without success.

Keith Ingram, the elections director for the secretary of state’s office, told the group the program was the only option available to ensure voters aren’t registered or voting in more than one state at the same time. Nonetheless, the activists moved forward with an effort that experts say is set to undermine one of the best election integrity tools available to Texas and other states to prevent election fraud.

“We want to be able to do something and we have a senator that’s willing to help change that or add language or improve or reform ERIC,” said Toni Anne Dashiell last August, referring to Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola. Dashiell, the Republican national committeewoman for Texas, organizes the meetings and refers to them as “TAD Talks.”

Shortly after, the group’s ERIC task force — led by Alan Vera, the current Harris County Republican Party ballot security chairman, and Dana Myers, the Texas Republican Party vice-chair — began drafting legislation. Myers declined to comment for this story. Dashiell and Vera did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment or to emailed questions about how the effort would improve elections in Texas.

Vera announced during a January meeting of the task force that they had submitted the draft of such a bill to Hughes’ staff for review. Hughes, who attended almost every single one of the virtual meetings, filed legislation with their suggestions as Senate Bill 1070 in February. Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, also a regular speaker in the virtual calls, filed a companion bill in the House. Hughes and Jetton did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Now, there is no evidence that ERIC is doing anything to Texas voter rolls, I want to be clear about that,” Hughes said during a virtual meeting in October. “But we do know, again, that the people running ERIC don’t share our worldview.”

‘Exponential’ increase in potential for voter fraud without ERIC

The conservative campaign against ERIC, long considered the gold standard for cleaning voter rolls, began with misinformation published starting last year by a conservative website, The Gateway Pundit, about ERIC’s funding and origins. As conservative doubts grew and ERIC, led by Executive Director Shane Hamlin, attempted to correct the record, activists in some states began pushing Republican officials to withdraw.

Louisiana became the first state to pull out last summer, followed by Alabama in January, after a new secretary of state took office. At an ERIC board meeting last month, officials for some Republican-led states pushed for changes they said were necessary for them to remain members: Eliminating a requirement that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters and removing an ex officio board member, former U.S. Department of Justice voting rights lawyer David Becker, who now heads an election-focused nonpartisan nonprofit and has been an outspoken critic of conspiracy theories about elections.

This week, in the wake of the board meeting, three states — Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia — announced they would leave the program. Some officials whose states remain, including Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose of Ohio, say they will also depart if the board doesn’t agree to the requested changes.

Largely due to the organization and advocacy of those attending these virtual meetings — the recordings of which are online — Texas could be next.

Experts say ERIC is among the state’s most helpful tools at preventing the exact type of fraud those who participated in “TAD Talks” profess concern about.

ERIC data from June 2022 helped Texas identify 100,000 in-state duplicate voters and another 100,000 duplicates of people who moved in or out of state, lists sent to counties to investigate. The Texas GOP and several other local and national conservative coalitions have for years demanded the kind of results ERIC has produced, stressing the need to keep voter rolls clean and prevent illegal voting. Supporters of ERIC say efforts to withdraw from the compact undercut that goal.

Former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican who left office after deciding against running for another term last year, told Votebeat that if states stop using ERIC, the potential for election fraud could increase “exponentially.”

Merrill said that since the program was created in 2012, there have been no instances of vulnerabilities or irregularities associated with it. “Nothing has ever happened. Nothing’s ever been documented. Only these failed claims that have been introduced without any empirical data to back it up whatsoever,” Merrill said. “Why would you want to eliminate this? That tool has helped us be in a position to prosecute those people who have violated the trust and confidence of the process. And there is no other system in the United States at this time that matches that.”

But the Gateway Pundit’s campaign against ERIC has resonated in conservative circles.

‘Very important information’ ignored

In addition to unfounded speculation about Soros, the fringe site has also claimed that ERIC shares people’s personal data with unauthorized third parties and that it is a leftist scheme to enroll ineligible voters. These claims have taken deep root, and former President Donald Trump openly celebrated the announcements of departing states this week.

The TAD Talks group in Texas first met almost three months after the Gateway Pundit began focusing on ERIC. By its second meeting, they were joined by Keith Ingram, the Texas Secretary of State’s elections division director. In no uncertain terms, he told them that ERIC was crucial to keeping Texas’s voter rolls clean and no alternative to the program existed. He also addressed a list of their concerns about funding, information sharing, and data security.

“Without ERIC, we wouldn’t have this cross-state data. We wouldn’t have the ability to find people who voted twice, or who voted after they were deceased,” Ingram told them firmly. “And we found duplicate voters in Texas as well, and we’re going to be prosecuting those. But all of that comes from the ERIC data.”

In the moment, the group appeared receptive. Dashiell, the Republican National Committeewoman for Texas responded: “Well, that’s incredible. Very good, Keith. Thank you. Very important information.”

Then, they essentially ignored him, meeting again months later and reintroducing the same false talking points Ingram had corrected. In January, the state party included an effort “to replace [ERIC] with a trustworthy system” that would ensure “only qualified and legitimate voters are voting” in the party’s legislative priorities for this year’s session.

“For those of you who want to explain ERIC to others who may not know: that is the cozily voter roll purging system that Texas is signed into. However I’m actually going to call it ‘Everybody Realized that this Is Corrupt.’ That’s what ERIC stands for,” Myers, the Texas GOP vice chair, said as she announced the legislative priorities during an election integrity gathering at the Texas Capitol in January hosted by conservative coalition Texas First. Myers declined to comment for this story.

Russ Ramsland, a Texas-based Republican businessman also known for spreading election conspiracy theories, was a featured speaker that day. The event was live streamed and promoted online by The America Project — a well-funded organization led by Trump allies Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, both known for spreading election fraud conspiracy theories. Myers also did a presentation with inaccurate information about ERIC in February at the Texas Federation of Republican Women Legislative Day event.

No alternatives to ERIC exist

Almost none of what the so-called “TAD Talks” participants say about ERIC is true. Rather than a Soros-funded group run by liberal activists, it is a nonprofit organization paid for and managed by the member states.

“Organizations like ERIC have sought to bolster access and confidence in our electoral processes by facilitating secure, interstate data sharing to ensure more accurate voter rolls. There’s broad bipartisan agreement by state and local election officials that this system works and has improved our elections over the last decade,” said Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state and a Republican. He said he was “deeply troubled to see politics and disinformation get in the way of best practices.”

Members of ERIC agree to send their full state voter rolls to ERIC every 60 days, along with records from a state identification agency. In Texas, that’s the Department of Motor Vehicles. That state data must include identifying information, if available, for every voter, such as an address, partial Social Security number, and phone number. ERIC then uses all of the data provided by its member states to find matches on multiple data points, suggesting people who may be registered in more than one state. It also identifies those who have died or moved, and flags flawed or incomplete registrations for correction by state officials. But it doesn’t control or manage state voter rolls.

ERIC does not email sensitive voter data and passwords back and forth and does not store it all on an unprotected server. It follows specific and extensive security protocols, which are detailed in its bylaws, and a board of cybersecurity experts advise the program as part of its Privacy and Technology Advisory Board.

Texas has been a member of the program since 2020. Of the $1.5 million that Texas allocates annually for the program, approximately $115,000 of that goes to ERIC to pay for membership dues. The rest goes to postage, mailing, and printing costs the state pays to send invitations to people whom ERIC identifies as eligible voters but who are not yet registered, something ERIC requires its member states to do.

While the price tag might seem high, experts tell Votebeat the program is worth the cost: It would cost the state substantially more money to access on its own the type of national data ERIC uses.

ERIC covers the costs of the subscription to the Social Security death data and the National Change of Address data, which for non-ERIC members could amount several hundred thousand dollars more per year. In addition, in order to maintain these subscriptions, non-ERIC members would have to spend more money to meet federal data handling requirements.

Still, for the GOP task force leading the effort to get rid of ERIC, the $1.5 million price tag is too high. Their solution was to include a price ceiling in the legislation they wrote for Hughes.

The bill requires the state to use a “private sector data system,” and restricts costs to begin such a program to $100,000. Ongoing costs may not exceed “$1 for each voter identified.” The bill also requires such a system to identify people who have been convicted of a felony and says the secretary of state may not provide information to such a system that “is not found in a voter roll and necessary to identify voters.”

It is unclear what alternative to ERIC they think would meet those specific requirements, and neither Hughes nor Jetton has publicly identified one. Texas law requires the state to participate in a multi-state information sharing program to clean its voter rolls, said Sam Taylor, the spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state. Taylor said the office isn’t aware of any system comparable to ERIC, though “we are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives,” he said.

A smattering of activist groups have publicly signaled interest in creating a replacement for ERIC, though none appears to have access to the breadth of data ERIC uses. At least one option Dashiell’s group considered is funded by MyPillow CEO and well known election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

At a meeting of the task force in February, Vera said they’ve been “evaluating” half a dozen options in the private sector, which he says can do more than what ERIC does and are more affordable, though he offered little evidence of either assertion.

He suggested using a system initially funded by Lindell called Omega4America or a program he referred to as “Eagle AI.” Without offering more detail, Vera told participants the Eagle AI program had been demonstrated at the Capitol last month, an assertion Votebeat has been unable to verify.

Vera said that at a GOP event, the Eagle AI team had presented “some stunning examples of the unacceptable condition of the voter rolls in Harris County. It was obvious to everybody present that ERIC is not helping.”

Active in election integrity issues with the Republican Party for decades, Vera is also known for frequently challenging the legitimacy of registered voters in Harris County. The Harris County Attorney’s Office announced last summer it was investigating allegations that Vera’s election integrity group — the Texas Election Network — had been knocking on doors, verifying voters’ addresses, and asking them to sign affidavits.

Vera did not answer Votebeat’s questions about who runs the programs he has suggested to replace ERIC, how those programs store data, or the matching methodology used.

A nonprofit run by former Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, a prominent purveyor of election misinformation, is also considering attempting to create a new form of ERIC, according to one of the nonprofit’s directors, Cochise County Recorder David Stevens.

Finchem recently repurposed a research nonprofit he founded in 2018 to focus on election policy, renaming it the Election Fairness Institute.

Stevens told Votebeat that there are “a few visions” for what the nonprofit will do, but one is “potentially a nationwide voter registration type repository,” he said.

“We will see what kind of work comes around,” he said.

Finchem and Stevens did not return calls seeking more information this week.

Some who have already tried to find or create a private sector system or nonprofit to replace ERIC told Votebeat it would be “impossible” to do.

While data from sources such as the U.S. Postal Service can give indicators of when a voter should be removed from the rolls, governments do not give out enough data on individual voters to identify hard matches, said Matt Braynard, a former director for the Trump campaign who now runs Look Ahead America, a national nonprofit that is advocating for tighter voter roll laws in states.

“Only the governments, with their access to very capable tools, like knowing someone’s Social Security number or someone’s full birthday, can do this,” he said. The type of matching used by programs without such data “sometimes is helpful, but in cases like this it is useless.”

Look Ahead America found this out firsthand recently, as it is using the U.S. Postal Service data in 10 states to produce lists of thousands of voters in each state who may have moved and therefore may not be eligible — one of the functions ERIC provides. With their more limited access to data, Look Ahead America had no way of claiming for certain that the voters should be removed from the rolls and their efforts were ignored by county clerks, Braynard said.

“That was a difficult nightmare, and in a lot of cases, the county clerk just said, ‘Screw you guys,’ ” he said.

And some policy experts say obtaining the kind of additional data the Texas Republicans leading the effort and Hughes are seeking, which aims to identify people with felony convictions, would certainly cost more than $100,000 to compile.

“Building something up like that would have fewer members and that would also try to cover areas or groups of ineligible voters that haven’t been covered by any sort of interstate system like that before is going to be a real challenge,” said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at Secure Democracy USA.

Demands from conservatives to keep the voter rolls clean and updated have been made for years — long before Trump spread lies about the outcome of the 2020 election.

In 2018, before Texas allocated the funding needed to join ERIC, a coalition of more than 100 conservatives in the state — including election fraud activist Laura Pressley — sent two letters to Gov. Greg Abbott demanding that Texas use a cross-state data sharing program to prevent non-citizens from voting. The coalition, formed by the Smith County–based Grassroots America political action committee, even suggested the state use ERIC or the now-defunct Kansas Crosscheck system. But now, Grassroots America has also joined the calls for Texas to withdraw from ERIC.

Merrill, the former Alabama secretary of state, told Votebeat he’s disappointed to see the number of conservative leaders who have promoted election integrity in their states but are now choosing to not use ERIC, a tool he described as “one of the greatest” for “election integrity, transparency and accountability.” Alabama had been a member of ERIC since 2016.

“You cannot hear me say this enough: If you want to eliminate ERIC, then that’s your right. But if you eliminate it, what are you going to replace it with? Because there is no mechanism in place today that accomplishes the goal that ERIC accomplishes,” Merrill said.

“If they say that they’ve got something, well then show me the money. Show me that it’s successful. Show me the beef.”

Votebeat reporter Jen Fifield contributed to this story.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.com

Three reasons everyone wins when voter rolls are carefully cleaned

2023-02-06T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

Hi, y’all,

There are few intractable laws in elections. But if one exists, it may be this: Every time we reach this phase of election cycles — when voter list maintenance starts — passions fly and misconceptions abound.

I thought – and I think many of you did as well – that perhaps this annual freakout was beginning to wane after Democrats and Republicans alike embraced the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, the multi-state list matching program we’ve written about, well, a lot of times. Perhaps that was an illusion (I hope it wasn’t!), because nonsense is now afoot, and has been since last year.

Louisiana, you’ll recall, “paused” its participation in ERIC before withdrawing altogether. Now, Alabama’s new secretary of state, Wes Allen, has removed the state from the program despite his predecessor’s public (and correct) assurances that the program is safe. In Ohio advocates have expressed concern that enrollment in ERIC may be endangered by laws passed preventing nonprofits (of which ERIC is one) from being involved in voter list maintenance. Bills filed in states like Texas and Oklahoma would ban joining multi-state list-sharing programs altogether.

On top of that, now that the federal election is over, states are returning to cleaning up the voter rolls – something required by federal law and many state laws. This tends to anger nearly everyone, though the spread of ERIC has limited the rancor of these debates. Advocates on the left often call even legally required list maintenance “purging” — an allegation of disenfranchisement that was truer before the advent of ERIC and more standardized practices across the country — while those on the right frequently claim maintenance doesn’t go far enough.

But in order to have an informed conversation about this stuff, you have to know why states do it at all. Those who are most likely to impress upon their constituents the need for strict cleaning practices have explained in detail the ways it prevents fraud (and certainly, it does), but that is far from the only reason to keep the rolls as up-to-date as possible:

Keeping the voter roll clean, and doing it well, is an enfranchising practice. The National Conference of State Legislatures has collected excellent research showing how necessary this practice really is. For example, knowing that a voter moved out of state not only allows one state to remove a voter, but also allows the new state the opportunity to reach out to encourage the person to register to vote. It also ensures that voters continue to receive the correct voting information by mail, a critical step to voter education.
States are required by federal law to keep their voter rolls clean. The National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, passed in 1993. It lays out requirements for states to implement procedures to regularly clean voter rolls and offers specific criteria by which a voter can be removed. Many states have passed laws with more specific requirements to maintain accurate rolls. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 updated list maintenance practices, requiring all states to maintain electronic, statewide voter rolls and coordinate between state agencies to keep information as up to date as possible.
Clean voter rolls help counties ensure the appropriate allocation of resources. As the Election Assistance Commission points out in this fact sheet (which many states and counties have adapted for their own fact sheets), list maintenance allows counties to prepare to serve their voters. Election directors cannot purchase the correct number of ballots, appropriately staff voting facilities, or confidently direct voters to their polling locations if the rolls are out of date.

None of this is easily done, though. List maintenance has always been a tedious, time-intensive process fraught with controversy and threats of (and actual) lawsuits. ERIC has helped states navigate the steps to a clean roll confidently and with a high degree of accuracy, but as states withdraw from the program it becomes less effective — much of its benefit is in the extreme breadth of available data.

And that’s a shame: The program has helped the country materially improve its voter rolls from where they were a decade ago, and the very politicians demanding fraud investigations are increasing the likelihood that fraud happens in the states they serve. None of it makes any sense at all! I feel like I write some version of that every week, though.

Reach out and tell me about effective campaigns you have seen explaining to voters why list maintenance is necessary. Next week, I’ll include a list of my favorites.

Back Then

The first state to introduce voter registration was Massachusetts, which did so in 1801 — several decades before most states would institute statewide voter registration policies. Some states, for example South Carolina and then Pennsylvania, instituted registration in urban areas only — state legislators were worried about the transient and immigrant populations that were most likely to live in these places. Connecticut was the next state to pass a law requiring registration statewide in the 1840s. The state had initially adopted a registry law in 1839, but it was repealed after Democrats deemed it “disenfranchising,” and replaced it with their own version in 1842. Now, the only state that doesn’t require registration is North Dakota, which abolished it in 1951.

In Other Voting News

Hundreds, if not thousands, of jurisdictions will elect people to very local election administration positions over the next two years, elections that will take place against the backdrop of a looming presidential race, Politico reported.
Despite Republicans’ 2022 election losses, a new internal report from the Republican National Committee is advocating more extensive “election integrity” efforts at the state level, including the creation of new training models for poll workers and observers that are rooted in unproven allegations of fraud by Democrats, the Washington Post reported.
A federal judge in Georgia is considering whether conservative group True the Vote’s challenges against the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters veered into voter intimidation and whether the group should be barred from making additional challenges, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Pinal County will not attempt to claw back a $25,000 performance bonus from former Elections Director Virginia Ross, the Arizona Republic reported, despite problems with the county’s election tally discovered during a statewide recount after her departure.
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, an election lawyer, continues to advise clients outside of Kentucky, including the former Senate campaign of new Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Adams has disclosed the work, which is legal, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

The truth about ERIC, the voter roll program targeted by extremists

2022-04-28T17:40:11+00:00

If it weren’t for a report Arizona officials received for the first time in December, election officials might not have realized that around 200,000 voters had potentially moved to another state.

In Alabama, the same type of reports, sent over a six-year period, clued officials into the need to check whether 222,000 voters had moved somewhere else.

After getting the reports, county officials in these states — and dozens of others that also receive them — began verifying the information and taking ineligible voters off the rolls. It’s the type of voter roll cleanup that election integrity advocates on both sides of the aisle want — the left wants accurate rolls so that election funding goes to the right places, and the right wants to tackle voter roll bloat it sees as enabling potential fraud.

But the program that sent the reports, Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, recently came under attack from far-right media, leading to a pressure campaign to try to convince states to disenroll.

“What they were saying was not true,’’ John Merrill, Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, said in an interview with Votebeat last week. “It’s one thing to have their own opinion, but not their own facts.”

The irony of the debate is that the same critics attacking ERIC ⁠— one of the best tools states have for checking for potential voter fraud across state lines ⁠— continue to baselessly assert that voter fraud, in part caused by inaccurate voter rolls, caused former President Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election.

In January, a provocative right-wing website, Gateway Pundit, published a series of blog posts with line after line of inaccurate or misleading information. The posts asserted that ERIC is actually a liberal ploy funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, intended to get more Democrats registered to vote. Gateway Pundit also suggested the program could allow private voter data to be released.

The episode shows how the lack of public understanding about how local election officials ensure voter rolls are accurate, and the role ERIC plays in this work, created an opening for disinformation to severely threaten election integrity.

Merrill said he was disappointed in the phone calls, emails and social media messages about ERIC that flowed into his office in the wake of the inaccurate Gateway Pundit pieces.

He immediately set about correcting the record, releasing statements stressing that: ERIC is one of the best tools that Alabama and other enrolled states have to check across state lines for duplicate voter registrations, inaccurate registrations and deceased voters, making it an important measure for election integrity. It is funded by states that voluntarily enroll — not by Soros.

Thirty-one states and Washington, D.C. — which are represented by an almost even split of Democratic or Republican election officials — trust its accuracy and security protocols.

Merrill said if he and many other Republican state leaders hadn’t stood up to the pressure, other officials hoping to score political points “may have buckled and said we are going to separate ourselves because we would rather not fight.” The damage to the program’s strength, he believes, could have been much worse.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson from the office of Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin told Votebeat in February that the state’s decision to put the program on hold had “nothing to do with” the Gateway Pundit posts, but that “numerous” experts had concerns with “election stuff.”

What election stuff? Ardoin’s office said they’re trying to get to the bottom of some questions about “how the data moves and how it functions within their space,” but wouldn’t give more detail.

Here’s the truth about how ERIC works, and why it’s trusted by most states.

ERIC is not funded by George Soros, and it’s not a Democratic venture

ERIC began in 2012 as a coalition of seven states — Colorado, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, led by Republican chief election officials, and Delaware, Maryland, and Nevada, led by Democratic chief election officials, according to Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director.

ERIC’s mission is improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible voters.

The Pew Charitable Trusts provided the start-up funding for the program, Hamlin said, and ERIC subsequently switched to a member-funded model. New states pay $25,000 to join, and each state also pays annual dues varying from $15,000 to $74,000, depending on the size of the state. That money pays for an annual $1 million budget.

The Gateway Pundit story incorrectly claims that the program’s start-up money came from liberal billionaire George Soros. To make that claim, it highlights a one-time $500,000 contribution from Soros’ Open Society Foundations to Pew for voting rights work. Pew is a national nonpartisan nonprofit that receives grants of more than $300 million annually.

While Pew provided the start-up money for the ERIC program, it has not given any money to the program since then other than a $288,000 grant for technology upgrades in 2019.* Soros has never given money directly to ERIC, according to Hamlin.

Merrill, the Alabama Republican, said that someone has to be “so extreme on their beliefs on the right” to think that any potential Soros involvement means the program shouldn’t be trusted.

There’s no national database of voters, so ERIC tries to fill the gaps

ERIC attempts to address the challenges created by a quirk of the American election system: There’s no national database of voters.

That’s because in the U.S., elections are regulated by the states rather than a central federal authority. That means there’s no comprehensive way to ensure that a voter is only registered in one state, and only voting once in a particular election.

ERIC was created to give states a way to compare voter data across state lines.

Member states must provide their full state voter rolls at least every 60 days, including records from a state identification or licensing agency, typically the motor vehicle department. That means ERIC is able to search for matches by using not just the voters’ name and date of birth, which could be shared by multiple people, but 11 separate pieces of identifying information. ERIC also collects national Social Security death records.

The sheer amount of data collected on each individual voter addresses a weakness that plagued a previous program, known as the interstate Crosscheck System and run by Kansas, which didn’t have as much data. That meant it was thus more likely to inaccurately flag voters who shared, say, the same name and birthdate, but were actually different people.

The accuracy of the program is lauded by voting rights groups and Democratic leaders, who have long been concerned about the tendency for Republican-led states to inaccurately remove eligible voters from the rolls based on weak matches, citing the need to prevent voter fraud.

ERIC’s database can flag, say, a Louisiana voter who moves to Texas but doesn’t cancel their voter registration in Louisiana — as many don’t. Or, a Louisiana voter who dies in Texas, which might not be caught in the death records in Louisiana.

It’s not illegal to be registered in more than one state as long as the voter only casts one ballot in the proper jurisdiction. Trump’s allies have cited worries about duplicate registrations leading to the improper casting of multiple ballots — something theoretically possible, but rare.

(The Washington Post reported last week that Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was simultaneously registered in three states, though there’s no evidence he voted more than once.)

ERIC requires participating states to act on what they find

The program is only powerful if states actually use the data.

Participating states must ask for data on at least one topic, such as out-of-state movers, at least once per year. Then, under the rules, they must use the information to update their voter rolls.

ERIC requires states to certify they have attempted to clean the rolls using the data provided, Hamlin said. For example, if they request data on voter moves, that means trying to contact at least 95% of voters identified by ERIC as potentially having moved.

Here’s what that looked like when Arizona received the report in December: The state received data on about 200,000 voters who had potentially moved out-of-state. Receiving that triggered a months-long process to confirm the information and years-long waiting period before ineligible voters could be removed from the rolls.

After receiving the report, state officials sent each county the list of flagged voters. The counties then sent each voter a mailing that served as a first notice. If it came back as undeliverable, the county sent a second notice and waited to see if the voter responded within 35 days. If not, the voter was placed on the “inactive voter” list — but could still cast a ballot.

If the voter remains inactive, by not voting or otherwise updating their information, for two consecutive general elections, the county can then remove the voter from the list.

Is there a voter registration component of ERIC, as well?

While ERIC is known for its ability to identify potentially ineligible or fraudulent voters, the Gateway Pundit posts focused on another part of the program, which requires ERIC to send participating states information about eligible voters who are not yet registered to vote.

The posts’ implication: The program is partisan, aimed at registering more Democratic voters.

Hamlin, who was involved in the creation of the program back when he was co-director of elections in one of ERIC’s original member states, Washington, said the insinuation is untrue.

What the member states did want, he said, was to create a balanced system: One that helped prevent fraud and provided an efficient way to register eligible citizens.

That means the lists include all eligible voters, not just Democrats. ERIC doesn’t even collect information about newly eligible voters’ party affiliation, Hamlin said.

“Registering eligible new voters shouldn’t be a partisan thing,” Hamlin said. “It’s about expanding participation in the process.”

Strict security rules for voter data transfers

Hamlin said voters shouldn’t be worried that their information, which is being sent back and forth between the organization and states, will leak out.

ERIC has protocols to ensure that data is secure, he said, and those protocols are reviewed independently by outside entities that audit the system.

“If we don’t protect the data, then we don’t get the data, and we fail to exist,” Hamlin said.

Hamlin said ERIC has never had a data or security breach.

ERIC does not release voter data with anyone outside its member states, other than sharing limited data for the purposes of authorized research.* Voter data is not shared by anyone outside member states, and voter reports can’t be released to the public. Member states use encryption to send data to ERIC via a secure file share system.

Sam Derheimer, who was on the Pew election initiatives team that created ERIC, said that it was a priority from day one to keep voter data secure as it was transferred to and from the states, as well as while it was in ERIC’s database. State officials told the Pew team at the time that their states would not participate if there was a way that private voter data could be compromised, Derheimer said.

“States take the security and privacy of their voters very seriously,” he said. “They wouldn’t risk that privacy in any system.”

In Arizona, Kori Lorick, the state’s elections director, stressed that “everything within the system is secure.”

State officials say ERIC is best way to cross-check voter data across state lines

The power of ERIC comes from the sheer number of states participating. The fewer states, the less voter data available to cross-check between them, making the program less useful to the states that remain.

Besides Louisiana, Hamlin said, no other states have signaled plans to suspend or leave the program. In the wake of the Gateway Pundit posts, ERIC has gotten questions from government officials, and put out an FAQ that addressed many of them.

Each state decides how it wants to use the program. Some request data more frequently, some less often.

“ERIC is the best tool that currently exists to identify voter participation in multiple states, identify dual registration in multiple states, and enhance voter rolls,” Merrill said.

Lorick, in Arizona, called the program “extremely helpful,” featuring data that incorporates other sources, such as death records from the Social Security Administration.

Hamlin said the program has been continuously growing since it started a decade ago, and it’s always been roughly evenly supported by Republican and Democratic states. So he isn’t too worried about its future.

“When you look at the map, red states, blue states and purple states all support it.”

Corrections, April 29, 2022: A previous version of this article stated that Pew had not given any money to the ERIC program since providing start-up funding. Pew provided a 2019 grant for tech upgrades. The article also originally stated that voter data is not shared outside the member states. ERIC has provided limited data to authorized researchers.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

The goals of the right and the left meet within ERIC

2022-03-21T17:20:47+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

We’re bringing our series about the Electronic Registration Information Center to a close. Recall that this all started because of a conspiracy theory in far-right media baselessly alleging that ERIC was a liberal voter-fraud plot. The truth, as we’ve shown, is that ERIC works to prevent fraud and does so better when more states participate. Another rebuttal to this conspiracy theory is that ERIC provides no advantage to Democrats, just as it provides no advantage to Republicans. ERIC simply benefits elections — for both parties. Given that the right is concerned about election security and the left is concerned about fairness in voting access, the attraction of ERIC is that it achieves both.

A recap of what the program is: a standardized voter-roll-matching service that gives all states the same type information in the exact same way, all aimed at removing ineligible voters from the rolls and ensuring that voters who should be on the rolls are registered at the correct address.

I’ll highlight something Justin Levitt, the White House’s senior voting rights policy adviser, said when I joined him on the Civics 101 podcast this week: “You’ll generally find that where you can have increased security without the tradeoff for access or other things that we like, that there is pretty uniform support for having that security,” he said.

ERIC is one of those things — a best practice that most election officials, regardless of political leanings, are enthusiastic about and supportive of, which is why it was so surprising when Louisiana suspended its participation.

Conservative secretaries of state have hailed ERIC as a way to keep voter rolls clean and free of bloat that can (and only very occasionally does) lead to fraud or mistakenly cast ballots. This can lead to a lot of nail-biting when it comes to local races with tight margins. ERIC also clears dead people from the rolls (though votes cast by dead people are incredibly rare), and prevents people from casting ballots in two states (this doesn’t happen very much either).

The left says it’s worried about disenfranchisement caused by aggressive and targeted voter roll maintenance. That’s not an unfounded concern — Texas, for example, attempted in 2019 to remove thousands of people who Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed were non-citizens from the roll, though most turned out to be legally registered. And a list maintenance process Ohio attempted to do in 2019 using its own data revealed a mess of improperly flagged voters — fortunately before any were removed. ERIC helps here, too.

“Removal of records from the list isn’t inherently bad or good,” said David Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who helped create ERIC when he worked at Pew. “Removing records of those who are no longer eligible to vote in the state or have moved is good. Removing records of people who are eligible is bad. ERIC helps make sure that only the appropriate registrations are removed.”

ERIC’s standardized roll-checking ensures that member states are largely doing this maintenance in the same way. Texas receives a report from ERIC based on the same standards that Washington state and Oregon do, making it harder for Texas officials, like Paxton or the growing number of Republicans advocating extreme positions, to call for aggressive list maintenance activity that could, truly, hurt voters as it has done in the past.

The kind of roll maintenance ERIC does also allows states and counties to appropriately allocate resources. If the voter roll is an accurate reflection of where voters should be registered given their address, a county can deploy its limited resources appropriately. Neighborhoods aren’t static, and not all polling locations will require the same amount of resources year over year. It is good for everyone that polling locations are appropriately staffed and equipped with enough ballots and machines to get the job done.

For all of these reasons, federal law requires that every state do list maintenance, and also requires that they do so in a “uniform and non-discriminatory” way. So if you are going to follow the law without removing people unnecessarily, ERIC is your best option. “States and counties are required to remove ineligible voters, but that’s good for the accuracy of the election and it’s good for voters,” said Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director.

As we discussed last week, ERIC’s most commonly reported data point is folks who have moved and who have not updated the elections office with their new address. And who does that? I barely even do that. It’s not your first priority when you move. When I finally did send a letter to the New York City Board of Elections in 2019 to have my name removed, they apparently ignored it, because I get phone calls meant for registered New York voters three years later. No surprise: New York isn’t a member of ERIC.

Becker says that states without ERIC “put all of the burden on the voter to keep a state’s records up to date, and voters don’t do this because they don’t think about voting between elections.” But voters almost certainly will update their drivers license when they move, and ERIC has that data, allowing states to send mail to the new address reminding the voter to update their registration. This ability to proactively serve voters ensures that individuals don’t show up at the wrong polling location or have to resort to casting a provisional ballot — something all activists (and really everyone) should support.

Our four newsletters devoted to ERIC may seem like a lot for a single issue in election administration. But as I said when we started this journey, debates like this rely on a common understanding of the truth. And the truth, folks, is that ERIC is among the most significant advancements in fair, nondiscriminatory election administration in this country. We shouldn’t allow the debate to be swayed by bad-faith arguments made by conspiracy theorists and grifters.

Back Then

In 1879 Republicans in San Francisco designed and passed the “Act to regulate the registration of voters, and to secure the purity of elections in the city and county of San Francisco.” That language sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn’t it? It was primarily aimed at undercutting the up and coming Workingmen’s Party, and removed elections from the purview of the elected board of supervisors and instead assigned them to a board of commissioners made up of the city’s mayor and four county officials who were appointed. It also created a registrar of voters who was to be appointed by the governor, and had the ability to remove voters from the roll if they were suspected of fraudulent registration. It also required that voters register in their individual precinct by ending citywide and countywide registration. No precinct could include more than 300 voters. Anyone who moved out of their immediate neighborhood was required to re-register.

In Other Voting News

A stunning analysis of the Texas primary by the Associated Press shows that nearly 23,000 ballots were rejected across the state during the recent primary, largely as a result of the new ID requirements passed by the legislature last summer. This amounts to roughly 13 percent of all mailed ballots cast.
The U.S. House Oversight Committee has announced an investigation into a partisan review of the 2020 election in New Mexico. The Republican-led probe in Otero County called for canvassers to go door-to-door to check voter registrations, which the committee has said may amount to voter intimidation.
Kansas lawmakers are considering felony-level penalties for election workers who mishandle ballots, based almost entirely on one Republican’s concern that ballots went missing in a single county in Kansas back in 2010. Democrats say the move is unnecessary and that Kansas’s elections are secure.
Michigan lawmakers are also considering a slew of restrictive bills, but these are likely to be vetoed by the state’s governor.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs has requested an increase in funding in this year’s budget to accommodate updating election infrastructure and shoring up cybersecurity standards across the state.
Fox News has countersued Smartmatic, alleging that the voting machine company inflated its estimate of $2.7 billion in losses resulting from Fox News’s consistent misinformation campaign. Fox’s key evidence is a report by a University of Chicago business professor who indicates Smartmatic’s losses are merely in the millions, not billions.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

This week I’ve taken a look at the precautions polling locations chose to use during the 2020 election to accommodate voters during the pandemic, compiled in MIT’s Survey of the Performance of American Elections. While poll workers in most places used masks, hand sanitizer, and markings on the floor to space out voters, only a minority of voters saw polling locations using, for example, barriers between voters.

Click to enlarge.

Fewer states in ERIC makes ERIC’s data weaker

2022-03-14T15:27:17+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

We’re back to exploring the truth about the Electronic Registration Information Center and explaining the important role ERIC has in securing elections. First we looked at why Louisiana seems to have suspended its participation in the voter-roll-matching program, then we took stock of the value other states — red and blue — have found in the program without harboring any similar suspicions.

Now I want to lay out the implications when states remove themselves from ERIC. In summary: It hurts the state itself, but it also hurts every other state in the program — especially the neighbors of the state in question.

Let’s first talk about data. ERIC is, to put it simply, a program that matches one state’s data with another state’s data to see if the same person is on two voter rolls, has moved across state lines, might be dead, or has undergone a number of other changes. In Louisiana alone since 2014, ERIC has identified 54,600 people who have moved out of state and 16,300 deceased voters. When you have more data to match against, you get more matches, so these numbers go up. This, folks, is just how it goes. It’s math. Thus, the reverse is also true: When there is less data, you get fewer matches and the program is not as robust. Makes sense, right?

When you have more data, you get more matches, so the number of flagged voters goes up. It’s math.

So, sure, Louisiana’s voter-roll accuracy is suffering the most from its (hopefully temporary) hiatus from this program, but everyone else is also a little bit worse off for not being able to match their voter roll against that state’s. Texas, the only ERIC member state that borders Louisiana, suffers more than every other state, because we have long known that while in-state moving is the most likely reason for a person’s voter registration to be inaccurate, the next most common reason is picking up and putting down in a bordering state. If any of the folks who commute from East Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, decide to move to be closer to work, neither state will be aware of that change. Texas and Louisiana are also constantly trading residents because of the intensifying hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and Louisiana’s withdrawal removes a key way both states would make those adjustments. As many as 250,000 people relocated to the Houston area from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for example.

Louisiana is the very first state to ever step away from ERIC, and we’ve demonstrated that the decision appears to have been based on conspiracy and rumor. While that’s bad for the citizens of Louisiana, elections officials in every other member state are decidedly not thrilled about this. So far, no other state has contacted ERIC with similar concerns, but they have expressed their frustration about Louisiana’s pullout.

Shane Hamlin, the executive director of ERIC, says that while the way the matches are done will not improve or worsen because of the addition or subtraction of any given state, “the more states that are in, the more cross state movers we can identify.” This has been a huge selling point for the program, and specifically helps ERIC recruit states whose border neighbors are members. “It improves ERIC’s value,” he said.

If you’re a state or local elections administrator, we want to hear what you think about ERIC. Take this survey, and tell us about your experiences with the program and what impact it’s had on the health of your voter rolls. We’ll keep covering this.

Back Then

As urbanization took hold in the late 1700s, lots of voters who were once eligible to vote by virtue of being farmers or property holders suddenly found themselves no longer eligible after giving up their agrarian lifestyle and moving to the cities, where they rented homes or apartments, for better quality of life or higher wages. In Northern Louisiana, as parishes were formally established in the early 1800s — such as Bossier and Caddo — white males found themselves newly disenfranchised at high rates. (We don’t know exactly how high, though, because number keeping back then wasn’t exactly awesome.) White men in North Carolina and Virginia saw similar disenfranchisement. Meanwhile, in the North the popularity of farming was increasing. But in places like New York, where farmers purchased land through installment mortgages, there was not the reverse effect. New York did not consider a voter to be eligible unless all mortgage installments had been successfully paid.

In Other Voting News

The Brennan Center is out with a new survey that shows that one in five election administrators are considering leaving their jobs before 2024 — a terrifying thing to read but probably not that surprising. With voters screaming at election administrators over conspiracy theories and sending threatening messages to their offices, and with legislatures considering laws that require extensive time and effort from election officials, one can imagine the exasperation of continuing in this work.
Making it harder is the lack of concern federal lawmakers show for our crumbling election infrastructure. In the gigantic budget approved last week, Congress apportioned only $75 million in election funding to be shared among all states. That averages to $1.5 million per state. For a comparison, a single county in Nevada recently budgeted $1.3 million just for printing and temporary staff for the midterm elections.
A bang-up analysis by the Associated Press has found that Texas flagged 27,000 mail ballots for rejection in its recent primary — a rate that far surpasses past elections — largely due to the state’s new election law. What part, largely? The part we told you about last summer.
Republicans in the Arizona Senate passed several new provisions to the state’s election code, but one Republican senator appears to be integral to mitigating the most severe proposals. “I’m a firm no — if it’s bad policy I’m not horse trading,” Sen. Paul Boyer told the Associated Press after being the determinative vote in defeating three Republican-backed bills.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard arguments over the state’s vote by mail law, Act 77, which was initially passed in a bipartisan manner in 2019 and hailed as a leap forward for voters. Eleven Republicans who voted for the law are now arguing against it in court, claiming that the state Constitution doesn’t actually give them the power to make such a change to mail-in voting.
The Tina Peters drama continues in Colorado. The Mesa County clerk was indicted on seven felony charges and three misdemeanors. Her deputy, Belinda Knisley, was indicted on six counts. All counts are related to election tampering and official misconduct.
Reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shows that Michael Gableman — the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who was leading a $676 million investigation into the state’s 2020 election on behalf of Republicans — wasn’t doing as much as Republicans implied. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said earlier this year that he had served more than 100 subpoenas — he hadn’t. Copies of only 86 subpoenas were provided to the legislature, and almost all subpoenas that were written to out-of-state entities were never served, including one meant for the Center for Tech and Civic Life and another meant for the Vote at Home Institute.
The Connecticut legislature’s Government Administration and Election Committee recommended extending modifications to the state’s absentee voting laws that were made to accommodate pandemic voting, allowing all voters to cast a ballot by mail, not just those suffering from illness.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

Hi everyone. This week, I want to take a look specifically at in-state voter movement identified by ERIC. While states have their own methods for identifying these voters — online voter registration, for example, has hugely improved states’ ability to find them— this is the most common type of record flagged by ERIC and accounts for most of the data provided to states.

You’ll see a massive jump in the number of in-state movers from 2020 to 2021. There are a few possible reasons. Texas and Florida — both gigantic states — joined just before that period, making the total number of voters whose registrations are examined in ERIC shoot up significantly. There are about 30 million registered voters across both states. Florida’s high number of flagged records, however, is a bit surprising given that the state implemented online voter registration in 2017, which generally results in voters more proactively reporting address changes. (This is the lowest lift for voters to update their address, which means they actually tend to do it, and also means that states tend to have more robust movement data than states that don’t have online voter registration.) Also, people just moved a lot in 2020 as the pandemic upended lives all over. Mass, unpredictable changes like this demonstrate the need for robust voter-roll matching. While ERIC isn’t capable of figuring out why someone moved or why they are on two rolls, it can simply highlight the fact of it for states and counties to handle as state law requires.

Why other states don’t share Louisiana’s suspicion of ERIC

2022-02-28T16:27:08+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Last week we tried to coax out the reasons behind the puzzling decision by Louisiana’s secretary of state to suspend its participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, the nation’s only multi-state agreement to share voter roll data for the express purpose of keeping these rolls clean. This week, let’s look at the valuable role ERIC plays in election administration in order to peel back why that decision struck so many as rash and directly antithetical to Secretary Kyle Adroin’s claim that he wants to prevent voter fraud.

First, some facts about how ERIC works. Members agree to send over their full state voter rolls every 60 days along with records from a state identification or licensing agency, usually the DMV. The data must include 11 pieces of identifying information, if available, for every voter, including address, partial Social Security number, and phone number.

ERIC uses all of the data provided by its members to find people registered on more than one state’s rolls, those who have died or moved, and flawed or incomplete registrations that need to be flagged by state officials for correction. If, for example, a registered Texas voter — say, one who lived near the border — died in Louisiana, ERIC would be able to provide states with data reflecting that voter’s death. Or, if someone moved from Louisiana to Kentucky and didn’t take themselves off the rolls, ERIC would find that. The advantage of using the full voter roll (with all the identifying data fields the public doesn’t typically have access to) alongside an identification database is breadth of information — instead of just matching on names (which can be misspelled or can change) and dates of birth (which are far from unique), ERIC has access to things like past addresses and email addresses. All of which mean few false matches, and quite clear indications to the participating states which registered voters no longer belong on the voter rolls.

The organization is overseen by a board of directors, made up of elections officials from each of the member states. The program is entirely funded by its member states. Fees are dependent on population and range from about $15,000 a year to $74,000. Even at the highest possible cost, that’s an incredible deal — especially since there is an entire cottage industry built up around suing states and localities over bloated voter rolls. $74,000 is far less than the cost of a single such suit, and also likely less than the cost of a single state employee dedicated full-time to maintaining the rolls with less effective tools.

J. Christian Adams is the most prolific such litigant — largely on behalf of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He was also the only named source for Gateway Pundit’s hit job on ERIC, which falsely claimed the organization was funded by George Soros and gave unauthorized third parties access to the data. Yes: A man who profits from suing counties and states for dirty voter rolls opposes a program that makes voter rolls cleaner.

In fact, partly as a result of Adams’ lawsuits, ERIC’s membership has seen an uptick. Kentucky, for example, joined after PILF and Judicial Watch filed suit against the state and former Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes in 2017, accusing her — accurately — of failing to clean the roles for more than a decade. As part of the settlement, Kentucky joined ERIC. And officials like it!

“Kentucky belongs to ERIC pursuant to a federal court order, following a successful lawsuit against Secretary [Michael] Adams’ predecessor for failure to maintain the voter rolls,” said Michon Lindstrom, spokesperson for Kentucky’s secretary of state, a Republican. “ERIC has been useful in providing information enabling us to clean up the rolls, including removal of over 10,000 dead voters in one month alone.”

Similar news out of Texas, which is one of the newest ERIC members. In 2020, the legislature explicitly appropriated funds for this purpose. Texas law requires the state to be part of a data-sharing program to clean the voter roll, and while Texas was a longtime participant in Kansas’s Crosscheck (remember Crosscheck?), ERIC has been the only such data-sharing program since Crosscheck went belly up in 2017 after reporters (myself included) repeatedly wrote about its cybersecurity problems and after lawsuits successfully showed that Kansas had mismanaged the data.

“Texas has used the valuable data that ERIC provides to identify duplicate cross-state voter registrations, voters who have potentially cast a ballot in Texas and another state, and potential votes cast in the name of deceased individuals, which our office utilized as part of Phase I of our agency’s audit of the 2020 General Election in Texas,” said Sam Taylor, spokesperson for Texas Secretary of State John Scott. “This program is a key tool for election integrity in Texas, and we appreciate our partnership with the ERIC member states.”

ERIC has succeeded where Crosscheck has failed. Rather than emailing sensitive voter data and passwords back and forth and storing it all on an unprotected server, as Crosscheck did, ERIC follows specific and extensive security protocols — as detailed in its bylaws and this explainer — and a board of cybersecurity experts advise the program as part of its Privacy and Technology Advisory Board.

The breadth of data compared by ERIC and its security measures have led states of all political tilts to see its value. Alex Curtas, spokesperson for New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, reports that “the state’s voter rolls are significantly more accurate than ever before.” The secretary calls ERIC “proactive and pro-voter.”

In fact, no other state but Louisiana has so far expressed concerns. One candidate for secretary of state in Alabama has pledged to withdraw the state from the program, citing the same concerns expressed by Ardoin, but he was slapped down by the current secretary — John Merrill, hardly a liberal — who said the candidate suffered from “a lack of understanding about how the elections process works in our state.”

Back Then

J. Christian Adams’ opposition to ERIC is particularly baffling given his full-throated support for Crosscheck, which was run by Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state for Kansas. In 2017, Adams penned an op-ed for The Hill declaring, “States should always be on the lookout for new ways to collaborate in the hopes of keeping pace with the electorate.” He also touted Trump’s voter fraud commission — of which he was a member — which sought publicly available voter rolls for every single state with the hopes of doing a matching process similar to Crosscheck and ERIC.

In Other Voting News

It is not looking good out there for voting rights and redistricting cases, which are being swatted down by conservative judges across the country. NPR has a piece spelling out the concerns of those who think this may do “lasting damage.”
This week the Miami Herald came out with a blockbuster investigation that revealed Republican canvassers in Miami-Dade had changed at least 100 voters’ party affiliation to Republican, allegedly without their consent. The State Attorney’s Office is now investigating, and a Republican legislator has already introduced a bill that would increase the penalty for such an offense. Also on the Senate floor: the creation of a state police division to investigate election crimes.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ended the redistricting process by picking a congressional map this week and leaving the May 17 primary date in place, instead choosing to move earlier deadlines for candidates who were being squeezed by rapidly approaching due dates without firm district lines. Besides the loss of one district, the new map is very similar to the current map, and is unlikely to result in a shift in the state delegation’s partisan balance.
The Guardian’s Sam Levine published evidence Thursday that undercut Shelby County, Tennessee’s case against Pamela Moses, who was jailed after attempting to register to vote while on probation. Moses believed her probation had expired when she registered, though the county alleged she’d tricked a probation officer into signing a form indicating her probation was completed. Through a public records request, Levine found that corrections officials had investigated at the time and found that her probation officer — not Moses — was at fault for the error. On Friday, a judge ordered a new trial and Moses was set to be released from jail.
There appears to be no end to the quest for new voting machines in Louisiana, where the commission in charge of making a recommendation for a new voting system has again delayed their final decision. This time it’s so the members of the commission can physically inspect the machines on their own before issuing a recommendation.
A bill that would require “smart” drop boxes that keep track of ballots and take pictures of those who drop off their ballots would cost 500 percent more than drop boxes currently in use, the AZ Mirror has found. If you are asking yourself why such a thing would be necessary, good question: There is no evidence of any problem with the current drop boxes. And if you are asking yourself, “What is a smart drop box anyway?” Good question, because they don’t exist.
Republican activist Christian Horn has announced his candidacy for Alabama secretary of state. If elected, he would be the first Black candidate elected to statewide constitutional office in Alabama history. John Merrill, the current secretary, is term limited. Horn joins three others in the Republican primary for the position.
The chair of the Delaware GOP has sued the state, claiming new laws expanding mail-in voting and introducing early voting violate the state Constitution.
A nursing home employee in Michigan has pleaded guilty to three counts of misdemeanor election fraud. She submitted voter registrations for nursing home residents who had not told her they wanted to register, forging their signatures. She was caught after the county elections office flagged the signature mismatches — an example of election administration safeguards that are effective at catching this kind of blatant fraud.

Good News of the Week

Shawnee, Oklahoma, resident Peggy Harwell, age 87, has been a poll worker in Pottawatomie County for 29 years, making her the longest serving poll worker in the county’s history. Harwell comes back year after year because she loves serving the people of her county and meeting new people, she told the Shawnee News-Star. She encourages younger residents to give it a try. “See how you can enjoy it and seeing the people of our county,” Harwell said.

Harwell was featured as part of the Shawnee News-Star’s “Heroes of Democracy” series, which features the local people who make local elections possible. Other subjects have included a couple who worked the polls together and a 92-year-old poll worker named Peggy.

No clear explanation for Louisiana’s decision to pull out of voter-roll program

2022-02-21T16:44:27+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

In late January, Louisiana suspended its participation in a multi-state voter-roll-matching program known as ERIC, one week after rightwing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit baselessly accused ERIC of being “a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up.” But if you ask Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s office, staff will tell you the decision had “nothing to do with” Gateway Pundit. What did the secretary base his decision on? The staff won’t say.

“We’re not having that dialogue,” said spokesman John Tobler, who said “numerous” experts had expressed concerns over “election stuff.” Who? “I am not at liberty to disclose that,” he said. What concerns? “We’re trying to get to the bottom of a major source of questions within the service provider” about “how the data moves and how it functions within their space,” said Tobler. What does that mean? Tobler won’t say, but he wants everyone to know “it’s not based on a conspiracy theory.”

In broad strokes, the Gateway Pundit story on ERIC — the Electronic Registration Information Center — asserts falsely that the organization is a front for lefty voter fraud funded by George Soros. That’s easily disproved. ERIC serves and is funded and overseen by its 30 member states, and employs a staff of three people. Those members are not “mostly blue states” as Gateway suggests, but a nearly even split. Soros has never given ERIC any funding.

Ardoin made the call unilaterally to suspend participation in ERIC on Jan. 27, saying in a press release the decision was made “amid concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports.” The only media report was Gateway Pundit’s article. Tobler wouldn’t say who the watchdog organizations were, and I have seen no other public concerns expressed from watchdog groups about ERIC’s security or funding.

Ardoin had all of the tools at his disposal to fact check the Gateway Pundit article and the resulting stream of misinformed public complaints. ERIC’s bylaws say specifically that no non-member states are given access to the data, and also address how the organization is funded. Ardoin, I assume, has read the bylaws: The state enrolled in ERIC in 2014, while Ardoin was serving as first assistant secretary of state. And even if he hasn’t, Louisiana’s current commissioner of elections, Sherri Hadskey, serves on ERIC’s board, and her predecessor served as ERIC’s chair.

The day Ardoin sent out his press release, he’d had a 75-minute phone call with Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, aimed at addressing his concerns. Hamlin called it a “good discussion,” and said Ardoin asked questions about how the program manages personal voter data and its cybersecurity protocols, as well as the requirements of ERIC membership. Hamlin answered his questions, and Ardoin asked a few more about data security after the phone call. “We’re working through those now,” said Hamlin.

Tobler, the spokesman, wouldn’t tell me anything more about the questions, or whether Ardoin was satisfied by the answers he’d received so far. He ended our interview before we could go over how Louisiana planned to continue cleaning its voter roll in the same way as ERIC has allowed, and he did not respond to follow up emails. Since 2014, the program has sent updates to Louisiana to report:

16,330 deceased voters
54,600 voters who moved to another state
543,450 voters who moved within the state
4,260 in-state duplicate voter registrations

Given the volume of that valuable information, Ardoin’s decision to stop receiving it is striking. As NPR pointed out in its excellent coverage of Louisiana’s decision: “The far right is now running a disinformation campaign against one of the best tools that states have to detect and prevent voter fraud.” When states suspend their participation, it doesn’t just negatively impact their ability to clean their own voter rolls; it makes ERIC less effective for everyone. ERIC’s strength is in the sheer amount of data being shared among states, and removing Louisiana’s portion of that data makes it difficult to, for example, alert Texas if a registered voter in the Lone Star state moves to Louisiana and registers there. Or for other states to let Louisiana know if one of its voters has moved elsewhere and should be removed.

To counter the far-right misinformation, we’ll devote part of our newsletter over the next few weeks to providing the facts about ERIC and explaining the important role ERIC has had, as 30 states have widely acknowledged, in securing elections. We know the way to keep a lie about ERIC from spreading is to be first in educating voters with the truth so they know the lie when they see it. We encourage you to share this newsletter with people who express concerns about ERIC, and let us know if it helps.

In the meantime, if you’re a state or local elections administrator, we want to hear what you think about ERIC. Take this survey, and tell us about your experiences with the program and what impact it’s had on the state of your voter rolls.

Back Then

Most states did not have statewide voter rolls at all until after the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which required states to develop computerized and centralized lists. Many states had previously kept individual local lists rather than one statewide list and painstakingly (or, more often, poorly) coordinated between counties to clean them. HAVA also came with requirements to keep these lists up to date, and ERIC is used by its member states to adhere to this provision of the law.

In Other Voting News

Thirty-three Democratic senators are calling for $5 billion in election security funding in Biden’s upcoming fiscal year 2023 budget proposal. This is half of what election administrators were all but promised last year, and an ask for money to be included in a future budget is hardly cash in hand.
A new Politico Playbook poll shows that about half of Republicans are ready to move on from Trump’s claims of fraud in 2020, though that varies widely by how the question is phrased.
Georgia Public Broadcasting is out with another edition of Battleground: Ballot Box — their invaluable podcast on elections and election policy — and it’s a helpful explainer on the importance of county voting boards.
A new bill would breathe at least a small amount of air back into the lungs of a law in New Jersey requiring a paper trail for all voting machines. The requirement was supposed to go into effect in January 2009 but, like many things in elections, was never funded and, thus, never enforced. The bill proposed by two Democrats would require counties to replaces paperless machines with paper backed machines as they age out.
Jim Condos, the Vermont secretary of state, has announced that he will retire after more than a decade in the job. He talked about his decision on WAMC.
More evidence as to how heated state races are about to be: Liberal super-PAC American Bridge 21st Century will spend $10 million as part of its “Bridge to Democracy” program aimed at state races for positions with particular influence over elections, like secretaries of states, attorneys general, and county clerks.

And finally: The midterms are underway, y’all. At least they are in Texas, the first state in the nation this year to hold its primary. Here’s the most interesting news of the week:

The week started with a lot of worry over returned mail-in ballots, rejected for the same reason all those applications were returned: They are missing identification numbers now required by state law, or the numbers are wrong.
Hundreds of Republican voters followed the lieutenant governor campaign’s mailed instructions to send their ballot applications to the secretary of state, which has no ability to process them, instead of their county election office, which does. The SOS will now have to forward the mail on, delaying those applications by several days. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says he encouraged this route because he thinks his voters don’t trust Democratic county officials.
The Texas Tribune has a deeply-reported piece on the worry some Texans with disabilities are feeling over the limited level of assistance they can receive at the polls under the state’s ambiguous new law.
KXAN in Austin is keeping track of turnout.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

This year-by-year timeline I created shows the pace at which ERIC’s member states joined the program, and the mix of states that joined each year.

Votebeat

Social media post shared by Trump misinterprets the way Wisconsin manages its voter rolls

Pennsylvania disputes claim that it’s in talks to share voter rolls with Ohio

ERIC data-sharing alliance helps uncover alleged double voting case in Pennsylvania

A guide to understanding the debate over keeping voter rolls ‘clean’

What does the law require?

What is the central issue in the debate?

Why is it hard to keep voter rolls updated?

Do some states have more registered voters than residents?

How ‘dirty’ are the voter rolls?

Do poorly maintained voter rolls allow for more fraud?

Are there noncitizens on the voter rolls?

Are there dead people on the voter rolls?

Can list maintenance measures lead to eligible voters being purged?

How a right-wing website’s false report figured in Louisiana’s departure from ERIC

Lawmakers in Virginia briefly had an idea to keep its voter rolls updated without ERIC

This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country

Activated by 2020

A more refined ERIC criticism

Flaws and omissions in Honey’s ERIC report

Honey’s claims gain traction

Friends in high places, and a new frontier

Documents show Republican-led states struggling to clean voter rolls after leaving ERIC

States were advised of ERIC’s value

States left ERIC without a replacement plan

Texas resigns from ERIC, a national program that keeps voter rolls updated

Texas set to withdraw from ERIC after final legislative approval

After a setback, a GOP effort to pull Texas out of a multi-state program to clean voter rolls could move forward

These state officials praised ERIC for years before suddenly pulling out of the program

Conflict over ERIC leaves swath of consequences

Withdrawal reasons don’t stand up to facts

Conspiracy theories cast founder as left-wing activist

Anti-ERIC movement grew despite officials’ defenses

Texas may be about to scrap a voting security system it can’t replace

Creating an ERIC alternative would be expensive and difficult

Past efforts to cross-check voter rolls without ERIC have failed

A cautionary tale

Conspiracy theorists may not have won office, but baseless accusations still have power

Back Then

In Other Voting News

States’ withdrawals weaken ERIC and show conspiracy theories taking deep root

Back Then

New From Votebeat

In Other Voting News

Conspiracy theory whirlwind threatens to blow Texas out of national program that keeps voter rolls updated

‘Exponential’ increase in potential for voter fraud without ERIC

‘Very important information’ ignored

No alternatives to ERIC exist

Three reasons everyone wins when voter rolls are carefully cleaned

Back Then

In Other Voting News

The truth about ERIC, the voter roll program targeted by extremists

ERIC is not funded by George Soros, and it’s not a Democratic vent­­ure

There’s no national database of voters, so ERIC tries to fill the gaps

ERIC requires participating states to act on what they find

Is there a voter registration component of ERIC, as well?

Strict security rules for voter data transfers

State officials say ERIC is best way to cross-check voter data across state lines

The goals of the right and the left meet within ERIC

Back Then

In Other Voting News

Infographic of the Week

Fewer states in ERIC makes ERIC’s data weaker

Back Then

In Other Voting News

Infographic of the Week

Why other states don’t share Louisiana’s suspicion of ERIC

Back Then

In Other Voting News

Good News of the Week

No clear explanation for Louisiana’s decision to pull out of voter-roll program

Back Then

In Other Voting News

Infographic of the Week

ERIC is not funded by George Soros, and it’s not a Democratic venture