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Since 2022, nine states where Republican officials administer elections have quit a nonprofit, nonpartisan consortium that helps keep voter rolls up to date through interstate data exchange. They did so amid pressure from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in March that the consortium "pumps the rolls" for Democrats.
Consequently, voter rolls in those states -- Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia -- are less accurate, and it's becoming harder to detect the small number of people who improperly vote in multiple states. Indeed, as 2024 begins, these same election officials find themselves spending taxpayer dollars to re-create the very tools that the system they abandoned had provided.
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."
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.
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.
* Guest editorial excerpt by The Washington Post.