Formed in 2012, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) grew to include 33 states and D.C. It identified 12.5 million people who moved to a different state from the ones in which they were registered to vote as well as almost 600,000 deceased voters still on the rolls. The database worked excellently, before fringe blogs started calling it part of a plot funded by George Soros to boost Democratic registration. ERIC, whose operating costs are paid entirely by member states, received some seed funding from Pew Charitable Trusts, which previously received support from a foundation backed by Mr. Soros, but he has never been directly involved.
The bogus claim that ERIC tries to boost Democratic turnout stems from the fact that member states agree to send information to eligible but unregistered people every two years on how they can sign up. In March, Missouri Secretary of State John R. “Jay” Ashcroft (R) said he was withdrawing from ERIC in part because it’s wrong to send “a solicitation to individuals who already had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision to not be registered.”
This was breathtaking but not as bad as what West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner (R) has said about the 2020 election. At a GOP debate this month, he insisted that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Mr. Trump. “It was stolen by the CIA,” he said. Later, he added: “The FBI covered it up.” Mr. Warner pulled his state out of ERIC in March.
Some GOP secretaries of state who pulled out of ERIC had publicly defended it quite recently. In February, Iowa’s Paul Pate called it “a godsend” and Ohio’s Frank LaRose described it as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.” Both announced on March 17 that their states would withdraw.
American Oversight, a left-leaning activist group, filed Freedom of Information Act requests, and two lawsuits, to obtain thousands of pages of emails from states that pulled out. These documents reveal employees privately acknowledging ERIC’s importance and the lack of adequate alternatives. One email showed Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff dismissing a blog post about the Soros connection as “horrible and misleading.” Texas’s then-director of elections emailed ERIC’s executive director when Ohio withdrew to say: “I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this.” Four months later, in July, the Lone Star State gave notice that it, too, would withdraw.
Virginia’s departure from ERIC in May stung because the commonwealth was a founding member under Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) in 2012. The Virginia Department of Elections says it implemented a new process in September to update voter records by receiving data from the Department of Motor Vehicles about those who may have gotten new driver’s licenses in 40 other states. Election officials say they plan on contracting with a new partner for National Change of Address mailings in 2024 while pursuing direct access to the Social Security Administration’s death file.
Further reinventing the wheel, Virginia has also signed bilateral information-sharing agreements with Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, West Virginia and D.C. — but not yet Maryland, which remains part of ERIC. Other states that cut ties with ERIC are signing similar state-to-state deals, but NPR reported in October that most don’t appear to allow for the sharing of driver’s license information available in ERIC.
In addition to the nine states that have left ERIC, two states, Oklahoma and North Carolina, have recently passed laws to preclude joining it in the future. As matters stand, only 24 states, plus D.C., remain members, including, fortunately, six key presidential battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), a former secretary of state, vetoed a bill that would have withdrawn the state. Election officials in red states that have stayed in ERIC, such as South Carolina, Utah and Kentucky, deserve credit for not bowing to conspiracy theorists. They’ve shown they take their jobs, and election integrity, more seriously than some of their counterparts.
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