There was no good reason for Texas to resign this week from a national, bipartisan effort to prevent voter fraud, but as the Associated Press reported, the Lone Star State did it anyway.
The exit from the Electronic Registration Information Center, commonly known as ERIC, comes after Texas Republicans began showing a willingness this year to leave the group, which has been targeted by conspiracy theories about its funding and purpose. Republicans elsewhere have cited other reasons for leaving the initiative and said they have been working on an alternate system.
Texas is the ninth red state to abandon ERIC. It’s also the largest.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, most Americans probably haven’t heard of the Electronic Registration Information Center, but it’s a relatively straightforward idea. As a recent Politico report explained, “The group is responsible for identifying out-of-date registrations on member states’ rolls, which typically includes voters who moved either within the state or to another member state, or voters who died out of the state they’re registered to vote in.”
For officials concerned about the integrity of the voter rolls — a group that includes quite a few Republicans in red states — the project seemed to have obvious value, and since 2012, 30 states signed on as ERIC members. Since the United States has never created a national voter registration clearinghouse, this voluntary, member-based project became the country’s biggest data-sharing program.
It’s also, as NPR recently explained, one of the nation’s “best tools to fight voter fraud.”
Texas has nevertheless walked away, and it has plenty of company. Louisiana was the first to walk away from ERIC, and it was followed by Alabama. In early March, they were joined by Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia.
That same day, Donald Trump used his social media platform to push some advice: “All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up. It is a fools [sic] game for Republicans.”
Soon after, Iowa, Ohio, and Virginia withdrew from the compact.
All of this unfolded surprisingly quickly. It was just last year when Gov. Ron DeSantis — whom no one would credibly describe as a “moderate” — celebrated ERIC’s role and used it to prosecute suspected illegal voters. The Florida Republican, before changing his mind, called the Sunshine State’s role in ERIC “the right thing to do.”
Georgia’s top elections official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, recently told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “Any state that prioritizes politics over best practices and opts out of ERIC ahead of next year’s presidential election actually runs the risk of having outdated voter rolls. If states are interested in strengthening elections, withdrawing from ERIC does just the opposite.”
A Washington Post editorial added, “If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC as the enormous success it has been in helping states clean up their voter rolls by identifying people who have died or moved, as well as those who have cast ballots in multiple states. But other red states might soon head for the exits, causing the system to collapse — and making ballot fraud harder to detect next year.”
And why, pray tell, would Republicans who are preoccupied with voter fraud — a scourge that remains largely imaginary — deliberately abandon a voluntary voter integrity initiative? Because some right-wing conspiracy theorists started targeting the operation with false claims — including, predictably, untruths about George Soros. Soon, GOP activists believed the bogus assertions, and officials in red states felt the need to accommodate those who fell for the conspiracy theories. Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, released an open letter in early March, trying to set the record straight. It was apparently too late. The consequences are already coming into focus. Politico reported earlier this month that with so many states rejecting the system, election administrators are “scrambling” to fill “a security gap left open by exiting ERIC.” There was no reason for this. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of State, recently explained that the right’s criticisms of ERIC “are not rooted in anything legitimate.” As is too often the case, that’s proving to be irrelevant in Republican politics. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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