For years, ERIC, or the Electronic Registration Information Center, worked in relative obscurity. Member states, which at ERIC’s peak last year reached 34, including key presidential battlegrounds, shared information about their voter rolls in a central exchange. The program revealed voters who were registered in two states, unregistered citizens who were nonetheless eligible to vote, and, occasionally, evidence of illegal double voting.
The system appealed to both Republicans and Democrats, offering data to help keep voter rolls up-to-date and also ease the process of registering eligible voters. Then, the far-right attacks came.
In January last year, Gateway Pundit, a site that’s pushed anti-vaccine and election lies in the past, falsely accused ERIC of being a George Soros-funded effort to help Democrats.
Within days, Louisiana’s secretary of state announced he would withdraw his state from ERIC, citing “media reports about potential questionable funding sources” among other reasons, and becoming the first ex-member in ERIC’s decade-long history. Then, this January, Alabama followed suit. In March, Donald Trump called ERIC a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.” That same day, Missouri, Florida and West Virginia announced their departures. By July, Texas joined what had become an exodus, following Ohio, Iowa and Virginia in announcing its departure. (Texas’ resignation goes into effect next month.)
As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the former ERIC members are now struggling to replace the organization.
On Thursday, Ohio announced individual data-sharing agreements with Florida, Virginia and West Virginia, and West Virginia announced similar deals Friday with the same states. But several of those agreements, reviewed by HuffPost, fell well short of ERIC’s capabilities.
Some secretaries have acknowledged the difficulty of trying to replace a multi-state organization on their own.
“There are still some limitations because we’re not getting other states’ data,” Jay Ashcroft (R), Missouri’s secretary of state who pulled his state from ERIC in March, told HuffPost in an interview, referring to the fact that non-ERIC-members can’t automatically check their voter rolls against ERIC’s remaining 25 member states.
