For decades, local and state election officials cleaned their voter rolls to make sure the names of ineligible voters didn’t appear on the list of those who were approved to cast ballots: If you move out of the state, you can’t vote in your former state. There’s no voting for imprisoned felons, except in Maine, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. You aren’t eligible to vote after death.
Accurate voter lists help prevent fraudulent votes cast in the name of ineligible voters.
However, in 2012, many states began contracting the task out to the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit consortium that states that it’s nonpartisan but has left-leaning origins. ERIC shares information it gets from member states with the left-leaning Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Pennsylvania is one of the states that uses ERIC. The state Senate State Government Committee held a hearing on Oct. 18 that looked at ERIC and the process of cleaning voter rolls. The secretaries of state for two states that left ERIC membership—Ohio and Florida—spoke at the hearing about why they left and what they’re doing now to clean voter rolls.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, who has expressed his support for ERIC to the committee in the past, was present at the hearing but wasn’t invited to testify.
“Pennsylvania has been a continuous member of ERIC since 2016 and plans to remain a member,” Ellen Lyon, Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson, told The Epoch Times in an email. “ERIC is a valuable tool for voter list maintenance. Since 2020, Pennsylvania counties have been able to supplement their annual voter list maintenance efforts to remove more than 130,000 duplicate records or records of voters who have moved out of state through ERIC’s voter list maintenance.
“The Pennsylvania Department of State believes so strongly in the value of the data we receive from ERIC that we have asked Pennsylvania’s Legislature to allow counties to use ERIC’s supplemental data to remove deceased individuals from the voter rolls.
“Baseless conspiracy theories and disinformation prompted questions about a program that every member state previously touted as a bipartisan success story that promotes clean voter rolls. The department believes strongly in the value of the data we receive and remains committed to ERIC.”
Privacy Concerns
By collecting private data submitted when people apply for a driver’s license, ERIC can show when a voter has moved to another state and make lists of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered to vote.“In 2016, without the consent of the legislature, the Pennsylvania Department of State entered into an agreement with [ERIC], a private corporation founded by a partisan activist,” committee Chairman state Sen. Cris Dush, a Republican, said as he opened the hearing. “ERIC claims to help states find people who shouldn’t be on the voter list. However, as a condition of membership, ERIC also requires members to mail postcards to eligible but unregistered people, encouraging them to register to vote. I have been very clear about my objections to this arrangement.”
Mr. Dush doesn’t believe that the state can enter into membership agreements such as the one with ERIC without enabling language originating in the Legislature.
No Audit Allowed
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd testified that there’s a narrative surrounding ERIC.“It’s a binary choice—either ERIC is all good or it’s all bad. It’s a tool. It’s simply a tool that allows us as a member state to check with other states,” he said.
But there have been roughly 30 member states, while the remaining 20 never joined ERIC, so states are really just sharing information with member states.
Florida left ERIC partly because of privacy concerns. Member states sign an agreement to share all driver’s license data with ERIC. The data are then shared with the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“We wanted some form of audit of the ERIC data to ensure that all of the security measures were in place,” Mr. Byrd said. “That’s essentially what we were looking for: an independent audit of member states of the ERIC system to ensure that our data was not being shared.”
That request was rejected, and Florida withdrew from ERIC.
In his testimony, Mr. Byrd confirmed that ERIC bylaws required states to do voter registration outreach with the data it provided, but cleaning voter rolls was optional.
Since leaving ERIC, Florida has implemented voter and election integrity measures.
“We need to continue this work. We’re just going to do it through a different path,” Mr. Byrd said. “The voter rolls change every day. Every day, people move in state, within the state, out of state, they turn 18, they register, they pass away, they become a felon, they get their rights restored—we have over 14 million registered voters in Florida.
No Intermediary Needed
Ohio pulled out of ERIC in March.“In recent years, it became apparent that this organization was really failing its members,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose testified.
He attempted to start a workgroup within ERIC’s board to address concerns.
“One of the concerns was that there was an ex officio board member who was put in place as a result of ERIC’s bylaws,“ Mr. LaRose said. ”This individual was a really noted and outspoken partisan activist. This individual had a seat at the table to access really privileged information. That was concerning for us.
“When we attempted repeatedly to try to remove this individual, the organization fought that.
“There were also concerns that ERIC data was perhaps being misused. ... We felt that concern bolstered the need for accountability and transparency. For well over a year, we were trying to remove this ex officio board member. We were trying to identify opportunities for greater transparency through both data and financial audits, because the cost of ERIC kept going up, and if we’re going to invest Ohio’s taxpayers’ dollars into something, we want to see accountability. This organization resisted those efforts at transparency. That was concerning to us.”
As states left, the value of ERIC was diminishing for the remaining states, he said, noting that when these concerns were brought forward, they were greeted with outward hostility by ERIC staff and some of the other states.
Ohio is now working with other states directly, using memorandums of understanding to share information that will help each state clean its voter rolls.
“We’ve got conversations ongoing with nearly 30 states and we’ve been able to enter memorandums of understanding with three at this point, with many more in the in the works,“ Mr. LaRose said. ”I’m confident that there will be many more states that will partner with us.”
He mentioned existing agreements with Florida, Virginia, and West Virginia.
For example, according to Mr. LaRose, during a national election, states can look at the shared data and see if someone with the same first name, middle name, last name, and date of birth may have voted in more than one state. That alone wouldn’t be proof that voter fraud occurred, but it would be a data point that requires further investigation.
“What this will do is provide a robust and transparent alternative to ERIC that improves election integrity and voter confidence without relying on some expensive, opaque third party,“ he said. ”We don’t need an intermediary. We can exchange data directly between states.”
