ERIC electronic reg info ctr

OOPS SEE ERIC VOTER REG

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NEW REP OCT 2024

...According to The Guardian, the emails also backed up previous reporting about two Trump-aligned state election board members who had passed two rules that now allow members to refuse to certify election results. This bogus idea that county board members should exercise a veto of voters’ will was the basis of Trump’s attempted coup. It’s hugely troubling that conservatives have identified this as a viable strategy to disenfranchise voters and undermine their preferences. PITBULLS

Ohio is another state where EIN’s agenda is resonating. The network’s Ohio state chapter played a key role in the effort to purge 20,000 voters from the rolls in Licking County, which had a huge population boom among Black and Asian residents. What’s more, the chapter collaborated with conservative lawmakers on a bill to eliminate voting machines so all ballots are counted by hand. In addition to adding a level of inefficiency, the bill would require a photo ID to register to vote, necessitating more voter roll maintenance.

In North Carolina, EIN met with state legislators who put together a bill that has been referred to as a “jumbo jet of a voter suppression bill.” In Pennsylvania, Cleta Mitchell spoke with a prominent voter suppression group on messaging tactics regarding the election. EIN also appears to have been part of the efforts of Wisconsin legislators to purge voter rolls in the state. All of these states are competitive on the state level and crucial at the national level, meaning Mitchell and EIN’s machinations to suppress voter turnout could have outsize ramifications beyond the affected populations.

One of Mitchell and EIN’s biggest wins has been provoking some states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. ERIC is the nonprofit member organization created and managed by state-level officials. Its members use a voter roll software that can accurately track and cull eligible voters. Mitchell held a summit in 2022 in which she presented a 29-page report on how ERIC was a threat to election integrity. Some of the secretaries of states from the first five states to pull out of ERIC—Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, and Ohio—were in attendance at that conference. ERIC also plays a role in helping states reach out to people who are not registered to vote. Mitchell pushed for states to move toward using her own organization’s software, Eagle AI.

Pronounced “Eagle Eyes,” this software is one of the most important tools at EIN’s disposal. It is a database tool that performs “maintenance” on voter rolls amassed by a web scraper. Eagle AI has been deployed to cook up the voter roll challenges by EIN and its allies. The database tries to match voter roll records with “accurate” information (such as addresses, obituaries, etc.) scraped from the internet to determine if any rolls are fraudulent.

The problem with this system is that the data is at best inconsistent. Some of the data that Eagle AI pulls is outdated, meaning that many of the voter roll challenges relying on the software as a primary source may be entirely inaccurate. The reality is that EIN’s Eagle AI is more likely to purge voters’ registration based on erroneous data than actually secure the integrity of our elections.

The Election Integrity Network’s actions should be viewed within the context of the larger network of right-wing activists to which it belongs. EIN is a member organization of the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition, a project of the Koch-funded State Policy Network’s Virginia Institute for Public Policy, or VIPP, and run by VIPP’s president, Lynn Taylon. The Virginia Fair Elections Coalition’s members utilize the Virginia Model—effectively a playbook on how to suppress election turnout.

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Former President Donald Trump and his supporters are setting their sights on a relatively unknown and mundane target, but election integrity experts say the results could have disastrous consequences in 2024.

On Friday, Rolling Stone reported that Trumpworld is coming after the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which dozens of states have used to organize voter registration data that was previously kept on paper. ERIC was created by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and has been used by both Democratic and Republican-controlled states without incident since 2012. However, the ex-president has railed against ERIC on his Truth Social page, calling it a "terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up."

Trump has called on Republican secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC, and MAGA-aligned attorney Cleta Mitchell has baselessly asserting that it was created and funded by Democratic billionaire George Soros (a rep for Soros' foundation told CNN it has "never funded" ERIC). Following the far-right's attacks on the system, ERIC has gone from being used by 33 states to just 24 as of December 2023.

According to Rolling Stone, ERIC allows states an easy way to purge voter rolls of deceased or ineligible voters, and offers a secure way for different secretaries of state to confidentially share voter info, like driver's license numbers and the last four digits of a voter's Social Security number "to eliminate any confusion about who a voter is and whether they’re eligible to register."

ERIC co-founder and former executive director David Becker — who resigned this year amid a GOP-led pressure campaign — said the far right's anti-ERIC campaign can lead to voter lists being "significantly less accurate" as more states pull out. He added that the problems that will inevitably arise from states not using ERIC could help fuel false narratives about supposedly stolen elections.

"There will be old records on the voter lists of people who are no longer eligible in the state that will fuel false claims of potential voter fraud. And there will be inaccurate records [of those] who are eligible in the state who moved within the state that they will likely not catch," Becker said. "Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner."

“The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers," he continued.

Voting software company EagleAI, which was developed by a healthcare CEO from Alabama, is being fielded as a MAGA alternative to ERIC. However, Georgia director of elections Blake Evans criticized an EagleAI presentation as "confused," and said it could "steer counties towards unlawful list-maintenance activities." Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the software's pattern of using property tax records to determine voter eligibility was "utterly unreliable" and could result in litigation from voters being falsely removed.

"There’s any number of spouses who do not show up on property–tax records. No one who rents an apartment will show up on property-tax records," Schmidt said.

Click here to read Rolling Stone's full report.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/another-far-right-group-was-posting-conspiracy-theories-about-voter-roll-program-as-red-states-cut-ties

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as Republican-led states pull out of a multistate voter roll program in response to Gateway Pundit-pushed conspiracy theories about the organization, a conservative nonprofit was apparently also part of fanning the flames.

Judicial Watch, a far-right legal advocacy group, published a white paper in early March boosting erroneous claims about the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan program designed to maintain voter rolls across state lines.

The paper, which the non-profit reupped on their website Friday, sought to legitimize debunked claims made by the far-right website Gateway Pundit last year, which falsely argued that ERIC was founded by “left-leaning attorney David Becker” and funded by George Soros.

Judicial Watch claims that Becker had a “history of left-wing activism and unethical conduct,” and that ERIC “shares the vast amount of sensitive personal data it receives from member states with another liberal non-profit, the Center for Election Innovation and Research,” which they linked to the “Zuckerbucks” controversy, another election-related conspiracy theory.

Becker did help a handful of states launch the non-partisan program with a group called the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012, but Soros never directly contributed to ERIC.Becker has sat on ERIC’s board as a non-voting ex-officio member since its founding, but on March 14 he announced that he would be vacating the position due to the conspiracy theories about his role that were being pushed by the right-wing media.

The Judicial Watch report was originally published on March 9, three days after Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) announced that his state would be withdrawing from the program alongside Missouri and West Virginia. That afternoon, former president Donald Trump attacked ERIC on Truth Social as well:

“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,” he wrote. “It’s a fools game for Republicans…”

On March 10, Texas officials also signaled their interest in leaving the program, and they’ve since drawn up legislation to do so. Ohio and Iowa announced their departures on March 17.

ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin posted an open letter on March 2 trying to bat down misinformation about the program, but it didn’t stop what would become a wave of red state officials cutting ties with the program.