Butch Dill/AP Photo
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen speaks during the inauguration ceremony on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, January 16, 2023, in Montgomery, Alabama. A day after being sworn in, Allen sent a letter informing ERIC of the state’s exit after criticizing the program during his campaign.
Few voters used to pay much attention to the fragile architecture behind planning and running elections. Complex details like counting ballots happens out of view except for during political shocks like the election of 2000, when mispunched ballots landed the impossibly close presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore before the Supreme Court.
For the moment, ballot design snafus have taken a back seat to misinformation campaigns. All it takes to undermine the integrity of elections today is an aggrieved former president and his minions continually spinning wild tales about deliberate fraud.
The 2020 election denial debacle and insistent voter fraud claims have been joined by fresh attacks on the Electronic Registration Information Center, the multistate coalition that state election officials use to monitor and maintain voter rolls, identify illegal voting, and register eligible new voters. Right-wing media groups have embraced the election administration equivalent of a January 6th-type assault on ERIC, and have established exiting the coalition as a kind of litmus test.
Eight Republican-led states—Virginia, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri—have left the organization, courtesy of a coordinated misinformation campaign of baseless theories that ERIC’s funding sources are somehow suspect, and that practices like sharing data with credible research organizations render it unreliable. Oklahoma appears poised to join them despite the fact that in 2021 the Republican state lawmaker who proposed joining ERIC noted that the organization “would benefit all Oklahoma voters by ensuring our elections are safe, accurate, and everyone who wishes to participate is able.” The North Carolina state legislature is moving forward with a plan to prohibit the state from joining.
American elections rely on a hyperlocal system of arcane decentralized administrative processes that only a few elected officials, public employees, and longtime poll workers appreciate. It takes small-d democratic leaps of faith to entrust the mechanics of federal races to this setup. Yet the architecture has held up, at least until election denialism became a feature and not a bug of American politics.
Michael Morse, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, sees integrity and access, two pillars of the system that the nonpartisan ERIC safeguards, at risk. “ERIC is a very clever way to stitch together state election administration to work just a bit better,” he says. “If you attack ERIC, you attack the connections between the states.”
Keeping voting lists current is a difficult process in a country where people move frequently. There’s no national registration mechanism as there is countries like Canada, where the national government registers voters and maintains voter lists. Thirty years ago, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act to facilitate voter registration for federal elected offices, by allowing people to register to vote when they applied or renewed a driver’s license (the act is also known as the “motor voter” law), by mail, at certain state and local offices. Section 8 of the act required states to maintain accurate and current voter registration lists.
By doubling down on partisan extremism, ERIC misinformation destabilizes interstate electoral cooperation.
In 2002, the 2000 election meltdown forced Congress to come up with another set of election reforms, the Help America Vote Act. That law used carrots and (smallish) sticks to persuade states to upgrade older voting systems like the ones that fueled the Florida problems, as well as an Election Assistance Commission to oversee that grant process and minimum election administration standards for states to apply, such as provisional balloting (which has posed its own issues).
A decade after HAVA, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, and Washington unveiled ERIC. Morse explains that through both cross-state and in-state matches, ERIC allows state election officials to ascertain whether a voter is on the voter rolls at a current correct address, and to delete that voter from the rolls at an old address.
Due to privacy laws, statewide voter lists maintained by state election officials often do not have enough unique information about a voter to reliably match voters up across states if, for example, a person moves from Minnesota to Delaware. ERIC utilizes both statewide voter lists and confidential motor vehicle department data as well as the Social Security Death Index and the National Change of Address list to facilitate correct matches between states. This makes it easier for states to update their voter rolls.
It’s a process that can’t be easily duplicated, although the dissenting states that have opted out of the organization (including Virginia, an ERIC founding member) seem determined to set one up. “I find it just incredible that states are saying they’re concerned about data privacy and so they’re going to move to a new experimental form of sharing data with other states that doesn’t have the very well-developed and established privacy protections that ERIC has,” says Alice Clapman, the senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice Voting Rights Program.
States have tried and failed to set up alternatives to ERIC before. Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach created the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program in 2005 to identify ineligible voters. (Obsessed as he was by voter fraud, he later chaired a Trump administration commission to uncover this epidemic that ultimately found no significant evidence. Kobach is now the Kansas attorney general.) About 30 states used the free Crosscheck program. But it had numerous security flaws, including lack of security and sharing of personal email passwords.
In 2018, the ACLU of Kansas secured an “acknowledgment of error” from the Kansas secretary of state’s office over Crosscheck, after the state revealed the personal data of about 1,000 Kansas voters. Meanwhile, false matches led to illegal purges of voters that were used to support voter fraud allegations. States left the program, and to settle a lawsuit, Kansas paused it.
Replacing ERIC with the equivalent of a Crosscheck 2.0 won’t work, according to Morse, who has studied ERIC and Crosscheck. “To me, that is just an attempt to undermine trust in elections, he says. “It’s a devastating move potentially because you can generate the appearance of fraud to feed more claims of fraud without actually verifying the lack of fraud, which is what ERIC can do.”
The ERIC-departing states are also falling prey to what Morse calls “vigilante list maintenance,” efforts by private organizations to use data “that is publicly available, but not reliable enough to be used for comparison purposes, but nonetheless compares the data sets and then claims purported fraud.”
By doubling down on partisan extremism, ERIC misinformation destabilizes interstate electoral cooperation. “It’s a breakdown of bipartisan consensus about election administration,” says Clapman. Republicans once also praised ERIC as a tool for registering new voters, she notes. “Now Republicans are openly expressing that they don’t think that matters.”
The departures mean that large states like Florida, the fastest-growing state in the country, will not be able to conduct regular voter roll maintenance in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election using the accepted data collection protocols. Election officials in Florida and beyond do not have the budgets, the technology, or the bureaucratic wherewithal to handle processes like registering for the federal databases that even a relatively modest system like ERIC uses.
Nevertheless, ERIC still counts 28 states and the District of Columbia among its members, and even some states like Georgia and Kentucky say that they are sticking with the system. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael G. Adams, who won a landslide Republican primary victory against two conspiracy-touting election deniers, has the motto “We’ve made it easier to vote and harder to cheat” bannered across his office’s home page. Adams has praised ERIC and castigated “misdirection and misinformation” from “out-of-state celebrities” and right-wing “media outlets on the coast.”
But the ginned-up ERIC attacks are just the kind of mayhem that right-wing chaos agents want to sow heading into an election year. This raises the stakes of and the possibility for election sabotage, which may lead to a replay of the 2020 political unrest.
