Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia announced their withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate alliance controlled by Democrat operatives that encourages partisan outreach efforts under the guise of simple voter roll maintenance, on Monday.
As previously reported by The Federalist, ERIC is a voter roll management organization used by nearly 30 states and the District of Columbia to ostensibly “clean” state voter rolls by removing dead or duplicate registrants. But as noted by government watchdog VerityVote, ERIC doesn’t help states clean their rolls. Rather, it helps inflate them by requiring states to send get-out-the-vote (GOTV) mailers to unregistered (and likely Democrat-leaning) residents.
Additionally, ERIC has politically compromised ties. Far-left political activist David Becker started the organization, and still maintains control as a “nonvoting” member of its board. Becker is also the founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of two groups that funneled $419 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to fund Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts in mostly blue counties of swing states during the 2020 election.
In light of these concerns, a working group of ERIC member states — including Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia — advocated for changes to be made to the alliance in 2022. In a letter to ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin, Missouri Secretary of State John Ashcroft cited ERIC’s failure to address Missouri’s concerns as the reason the state is withdrawing from the pact.
Those concerns, Ashcroft wrote, include refusing to “require member states to participate in addressing multi-state voter fraud”; focusing on “adding names to voter rolls by requiring a solicitation to individuals who already had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision to not be registered”; allowing “for a hyper-partisan individual to be an ex-officio non-voting member on its governance board”; and unnecessarily restricting “how Missouri utilizes data reports.”
“We have worked hard over the last several years to implement procedures that will make Missouri elections better, voter rolls more accurate, and bring greater trust to the election process,” Ashcroft said in a press release on Missouri’s decision to withdraw. “Voter confidence is compromised when individuals vote in more than one state and nothing is done. It appears that ERIC will not make the necessary changes to address these concerns, therefore, it is time to move on.”
Another concern the state leaders expressed was the requirement for states to share confidential voter data — usually DMV or social services data — with ERIC.
“As Secretary of State, I have an obligation to protect the personal information of Florida’s citizens, which the ERIC agreement requires us to share,” Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said in a press release. “Florida has tried to back reforms to increase protections, but these protections were refused. Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC.”
Likewise, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner decried the alleged partisanship of ERIC.
“There is no defensible justification to allow any opportunity for partisanship in voter registration and list maintenance, much less in the administration of our nation’s elections,” Warner said in the Missouri press release.
Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia aren’t the only states to withdraw from ERIC. Last year, Louisiana and Alabama both suspended their participation.
