A poll worker welcomes a voter on the first day of early voting in May in Columbia, South Carolina.Sean Rayford/Getty
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In January 2022, at an event hosted by one of the scores of local “election integrity” groups inspired by Donald Trump’s fraudulent assertion that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin made a big announcement: His state was leaving ERIC.
This was puzzling because, amid all the Republican pearl-clutching over election integrity, ERIC was the single organization best equipped to help states ensure exactly that.
And suddenly MAGA Republicans wanted nothing to do with it.
Conspiracy theorists “spread lies about me… They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works.”
ERIC is short for Electronic Registration Information Center. It’s a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition established in 2012 by elections officials from seven states—then four red, three blue—who joined forces to bulletproof their voting processes. This, of course, was before the right twisted the term “election integrity,” much as they’d previously usurped the word “patriot,” as a partisan identifier somewhat opposite from its original meaning.
And what does ERIC do? Well, member states submit voter registration and vehicle registration data through secure channels, allowing for cross-referencing. That’s valuable because people frequently move within and among states. Young people become eligible. Noncitizens become citizens. Former felons have rights restored. Newly incarcerated people lose them. And lots of people die.
ERIC helps its members track voter moves and purge their lists of duplicate registrations (Michael Mechanic vs. Mike Mechanic) and dead people (hopefully neither of those). It identifies people who are eligible yet unregistered. And after a national election, if requested, ERIC will produce reports flagging any signs of potential illegal voting—of a person casting ballots in two or more states or casting more than one ballot in one state, or voting on behalf of a recently dead relative, for example.
“These are all laudable, uncontroversial goals that have made our voter registration rolls more accurate and our elections more accessible and secure,” Jonathan Diaz, an executive with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an article extolling ERIC’s virtues.
ERIC attracted more new members every year. By the time of Ardoin’s announcement, it had 31 member states, plus DC, and was respected on both sides of the aisle as a powerful tool to help keep voter rolls in shape, improve access, and flag potential fraud. John Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023, recalls that ERIC had more Republican-run than Democratic-run states at the time. “Its integrity has been intact from its creation,” he told me.
“The people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” says Alabama’s former secretary of state. “And I have a problem with that.”
And yet his state was next to fall. In January 2023. Merrill’s predecessor, Wes Allen, withdrew Alabama from ERIC as his first official act. (“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me,” he stated in his announcement.) Allen was followed by a parade of red-state officials, some echoing baseless conspiracy theories, such as a bogus claim that ERIC got funding from George Soros. David Becker, a nonvoting board member who’d helped establish ERIC but is no longer involved, also came under attack.
“Conspiracy theorists targeted ERIC. Apparently, it was working too well for them,” Becker, also the founder and director of the “fiercely nonpartisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research, recalled at a CEIR press briefing on Friday. “They spread lies about me,” he said, and “They spread lies about ERIC’s funding, what ERIC does, how ERIC works. We continue to see that.”
Trump himself piled on: “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 on Truth Social in March 2023, showcasing his complete ignorance of ERIC’s role.
Red-state officials played along. After Alabama came Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia, then Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. By 2024, nearly a third of the member states had bailed, though a handful of reliably conservative states (Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Utah) remain. Officials from the departing states “succumbed to that disinformation, even as they admitted that they knew it was false, and within days of leaving, were proudly trumpeting voter fraud investigations and prosecutions they did that came solely from ERIC,” Becker said. “We saw this in several states.”
“I think that the people who decided that they did not want to be a part of ERIC did so for political reasons,” Merrill told me. “I don’t know anybody that had a factual base for removing their state because of an exposed vulnerability, inconsistency, or irregularity that they felt was a problem for ERIC’s integrity—and if they did, they never shared that publicly. Never. And I have a problem with that.”
In 2022, the year Louisiana bailed, ERIC flagged some 2.4 million interstate moves, 7.3 million intrastate moves, 203,210 duplicate listings, and 65,437 dead voters. Four years later, post-exodus, those numbers were much reduced: roughly 604,000 interstate, 881,00o intrastate, 61,000 duplicates, and 17,000 dead. To boost election integrity, Republicans officials might well have considered recruiting more states to join ERIC instead of taking their ball and going home.
Member states do have some obligations. They must agree to use ERIC’s list maintenance reports to keep their rolls accurate. They must review all potential cases of illegal voting that ERIC flags and refer the credible ones to law enforcement regardless of which party benefitted. They also must, and this is another reason some red states soured on ERIC, use its “Eligible but Unregistered” report to offer basic voter registration information to the people it identifies.
“I don’t think there are five justices who want to own the chaos that would ensue” if the Supreme Court let Trump interfere with voting by mail.
Part of any secretary of state’s job is, or should be, to encourage voter participation. But apparently they don’t make ’em like they used to.
Merrill, who now runs a consultancy called Morning in Alabama LLC that sometimes works with voting groups, has experienced pushback for his outspokenness. “I’ve had conservative ideologues who have said, “Oh, you, you embrace the liberal agenda,” he told me. “I’m like, ‘What? Where’s the agenda?’ I never saw an agenda. I used ERIC as a tool, just like we use the Kansas Interstate Crosscheck System, to multiply our efforts in Alabama to ensure that we had the best election administration system that we could have.”
If anything, he says, withdrawing from the compact has damaged election integrity in those former member states, including his own.
Becker concurs. Those states, he said, “have really kneecapped their own ability to maintain accurate voter lists and potentially combat fraud, and all in service of conspiracy theorists who seem more concerned with raising money and diminishing American election integrity than actually contributing anything substantial.”
The red-state ERIC exodus isn’t a new story, but it’s timely again as Trump’s Department of Justice ramps up attacks on states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. In its effort to obtain those lists, the DOJ has taken 30 states to court—and lost in 23 of the 23 cases decided to date. Administration officials have even threatened to prosecute election officials for ill-defined missteps, and have hinted, also vaguely, that they could dispatch ICE or federal troops to polling places. (“This is not going to happen,” Becker said on Friday.)
Most recently, and egregiously, the administration has made moves to monkeywrench postal delivery of ballots in those blue and purple states unwilling to hand over their lists—to a government, mind you, that has obliterated any presumption that it will play fair, and that it won’t weaponize state voter data for partisan advantage.
On Friday, Becker said he didn’t believe the Supreme Court would allow Trump to interfere with mail voting so close to the midterms. “I don’t think there are five justices,” he said, “who want to own the chaos that would ensue and, in some ways, the chaos that might affect Republican voters worse than Democratic voters.”
But if the administration’s purpose is to undermine public confidence in an election in which Trump’s party is expected to fare poorly, then they’ve already succeeded.
