West Virginia’s top elections official praised Virginia’s decision to exit the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) voter roll maintenance service after Democrats criticized Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin for the move, accusing Republicans of voter suppression.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, general counsel Donald “Deak” Kersey, and Chuck Flannery, Warner’s deputy secretary and chief of staff, participated in a May 15 webinar hosted by the Virginia-based Middle Resolution Policy Foundation.
The Middle Resolution Policy Foundation advocates for issues such as voter ID laws, election integrity, school choice, and parental rights in Virginia. The organization invited Warner, Flannery, and Kersey to speak at the webinar about how they improved West Virginia’s election management after leaving ERIC.
“No matter what the Republicans do, or the conservatives are going to do, it’s going to be called voter suppression,” Warner said during the webinar. “Let’s deal with facts and reality.”
Democrat state lawmakers in Virginia have accused Republicans of engaging in voter suppression by withdrawing from ERIC, a service they claim ensures accurate voter rolls.
“States along with Virginia have a long history of racist voter suppression tactics, and this is just one more move,” Democrat state Sen. Mamie Locke said at a May 15 press conference about ERIC. “Just recently, Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Republicans unleashed their latest attempt to undermine our democracy and make it harder for Virginians to vote.”
House Minority Leader Don Scott and Democrat Del. Marcus Simon also blasted Youngkin and Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals, saying they are following “MAGA extremists” for questioning the integrity of the 2020 elections and ERIC.
Legislatures in Charge
Kersey, who specializes in laws pertaining to maintaining voter lists, said the responsibility for how elections are run falls on state legislatures, not the executives.The voter suppression accusation is “misinformed,” Kersey said, because “executives don’t make legislation and everybody’s right and ability to register to vote is founded in the state’s laws and the processes.”
During the webinar, Warner said Democrats dismissed legitimate voting concerns from half of all American voters after the 2020 election, and instead of looking into concerns about potential voter fraud, the Biden administration and many government officials characterized those concerned Americans as domestic terrorists.
Warner mentioned the voter ID law enacted in Georgia last year, where Democrats accused Republicans of voter suppression because of the policy.
Those accusations were unfounded and were proven disingenuous when it was shown that more people voted after the law was passed, Warner said.
During the Democrats’ May 15 press conference, Scott said that if Democrats win back the House of Delegates in November, he would consider holding the state budget hostage until Virginia rejoins ERIC.
“I would love to make that a point, that there is no budget if we pull out of ERIC. There is no budget,” Scott said.
Virginia Democrats said they don’t trust the Youngkin administration to maintain accurate voter rolls after leaving ERIC.
Replacing ERIC
Also at the May 15 press conference, Simon asked how Virginia will maintain its voter rolls now.“If not through ERIC, how are we going to do it?” he said, adding that he is concerned about what will replace ERIC with only a year before the 2024 presidential primary and general election.
Andrea Gaines, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Elections, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that state officials will continue to conduct their own list maintenance practices, including the removal of deceased voters, felons, noncitizens, and mentally incapacitated individuals from the voter rolls, based on information received from the courts.
The department will also obtain its own subscription to the Limited Access Death Master File from the Social Security Administration and will internally process records of voters who have moved and obtained a driver’s license in a new state.
Problems with ERIC
Warner said that when he became secretary of state in West Virginia in 2017, the state’s voter rolls had a massive number of duplicates.“Our rolls got so bloated. We’re talking 400,000 names we’ve taken off in a state with only 1.1 million registered voters,” Warner said.
Voters were being registered several times over because state agencies in several other states were registering voters automatically.
“They want people on those rolls and they don’t want to take them off,” Warner said.
West Virginia exited ERIC in March, along with Missouri and Florida.
Kersey said ERIC started as a bipartisan organization but has “become a partisan tool.”
Before exiting ERIC, West Virginia tried to implement reforms to ERIC, including making certain data-sharing voluntary and getting rid of ex officio members, but ERIC members could not agree to these terms.
“At that moment, it was clear to us that the partisan nature of ERIC and the partisanship that was shown by the members to keep the ex officio members there—it was clear for us. The decision was easy. We had to step out,” Flannery said during the webinar.
Another issue was that ERIC required its members to send mail-in ballots to “eligible but unregistered” (EBU) voters, which West Virginia election officials thought was not lawful. The EBU data comes from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“In West Virginia, now that we’re out [of ERIC], we'll wait to see what our Legislature tells us to do. And if they tell us to do it, we will,” Flannery said.
If Virginia Democrats want to rejoin ERIC, they need to address that during their legislative session, he added.
“They need to go to their Legislature and they need to get the law passed and the funding to do it from their Legislature,” Flannery said.
Currently, West Virginia uses four main sources to maintain accurate voter registration lists, including other states’ voter registration lists, other states’ Department of Motor Vehicles lists, death data from the Social Security Administration, and data sources that are available virtually.
The state’s work to maintain voter lists has been successful because all counties comply with the laws, which has created a uniformity for registering new voters, Flannery said. The secretary of state has created a culture of following the law, he added, “and we just give the resources, the leadership, and the tools necessary.”
Restoring Confidence
Confidence in the election process has been shattered for many Americans because of how voting was handled in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada during the 2020 election, Warner said.“That’s where the next presidency is going to be determined, just as it has in the last several elections,” he added. “The key to election confidence is abiding by the law. West Virginia has done a great job of balancing access with security.”
Moving forward, all state election departments must follow their state’s election laws and reverse pandemic-era voting procedures such as the use of unmonitored ballot drop boxes and unlimited mail-in voting, he said.
Flannery said that all 55 county clerks in West Virginia follow the state’s directives and work together to maintain voter rolls.
“The lists are no longer bloated,“ he said. ”Confidence in the process is through the roof in West Virginia.”
