Election conspiracies compound dispute over voter fraud system
ATLANTA — A bipartisan effort among states to combat voter fraud has found itself in the crosshairs of conspiracy theories fueled by Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election and now faces an uncertain future.
One state has dropped out, a second is in the process of doing so and a handful of other Republican-led states are deciding whether to stay.
The aim of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voluntary system known as ERIC, has been to help member states maintain accurate lists of registered voters by sharing data that allows officials to identify and remove people who have died or moved to other states. Reports also help states identify and ultimately prosecute people who vote in multiple states.
In Maryland, election officials have received reports identifying 66,000 potentially deceased voters and 778,000 people who may have moved out of state since 2013. In Georgia, the system is credited with providing data to remove nearly 100,000 voters no longer eligible to vote.
Yet the effort to improve election integrity and thwart voter fraud has become a target of suspicion among some Republicans after a series of online posts early last year questioning its funding and purpose.
Shortly after, Louisiana left the group, citing concerns raised by the posts. A day after being sworn in last month, Alabama’s new secretary of state, Wes Allen, sent a letter informing the center of the state’s exit after criticizing the program during his campaign.
Other Republicanled states could follow, according to a survey of state election offices by The Associated Press. Officials in Florida and Missouri said they are evaluating their participation, while legislation in Texas could force the state to leave. West Virginia election officials declined to weigh in, saying they are “closely monitoring the situation with ERIC’s membership.”
The departures and potential for additional ones have frustrated state election officials involved in the effort and have demonstrated how deeply election conspiracies have spread throughout the Republican Party.
“The idea that any state would leave, and we know many are leaving or considering leaving, based solely on misinformation that in most cases they know is not accurate — it’s bizarre to me,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “Their leaving directly harms the security and integrity of their own state voter rolls and their ability to keep them up to date and accurate.”
Not all Republican-led states are re-evaluating their participation in the program. Of those surveyed by AP, election offices in 23 states and the District of Columbia said they had no intention of leaving, including eight led or controlled by Republicans. Four state offices did not respond: Alaska, Colorado, Delaware and Washington.
Republican officials who said they had no intention to leave signaled strong support for the effort. Iowa’s chief election official said the program, in less than a year, had helped the state identify more than 1,300 deceased voters not included in state data.
“ERIC is an effective tool for ensuring the integrity of Iowa’s voter rolls,” said Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican in his third term.
The program was started in 2012 by seven states and was bipartisan from the beginning, with four of the founding states led by Republicans. Today, 32 states and the District of Columbia are members.
In April, that will drop to 31 when Alabama officially leaves the group. Allen made various claims during his 2022 campaign about the group that prompted a rebuke from then-Secretary of State John Merrill. Merrill, a Republican, noted that ERIC had identified more than 19,000 records of potentially deceased Alabama voters since 2016.
A chief complaint about the program is it was funded by George Soros, the billionaire investor, who has long been the subject of conspiracy theories. While ERIC received initial funding from the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts, that money was separate from the money provided to Pew by a Soros-affiliated organization that went to an unrelated effort, said ERIC’s executive director, Shane Hamlin.