The Republican-led attack on voter records system is an attack on democracy

The subvert-the-elections movement apparently is trying to make a mess of voter registration rolls. Those who believe in democracy should put a stop to it.

This time, their target is a system in which many states came together to share voter registration information. The nonprofit bipartisan clearinghouse they created, called the Election Registration Information Center, notifies election officials if people from one state register to vote in another state. Many people who move never think to do that on their own, which is a problem because tens of millions of people move from one state to another every year.

Last year, for example, former Trump administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was simultaneously registered in North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina. At one point, Trump strategist Steve Bannon was registered to vote both in Florida and New York. That’s not illegal, as long as people don’t try to vote in two different states in the same election.

But ERIC, which has 29 states and the District of Columbia as members, is extremely useful to election officials who need to clean up voter registration rolls. It flags people who have died in other states, even if they never registered to vote there. It checks such data sources as vehicle, Social Security and U.S. Postal Service change-of-address lists. It is an effective tool to prevent voting fraud, it saves money and it is invaluable in a nation with a decentralized voter registration system.

According to ERIC, one out of eight voter registrations in the United States was no longer valid or was significantly inaccurate before ERIC went into operation in 2012. ERIC says it has updated 36.5 million voting records and found more than 1.8 million dead people who were listed as voters, and about 2.75 million people who were registered in more than one state.

Clearly, getting all that straightened out was a huge benefit.

But now — after an onslaught of right-wing conspiracy disinformation on the internet — eight Republican-led states have pulled out of ERIC, giving such excuses as saying it is funded by George Soros, which it isn’t, and complaining that it notifies eligible voters that they aren’t registered.

Often, the local officials who have to do the actual work of cleaning up voter rolls were taken by surprise. Efforts are underway to pull other states out as well.

The real motivation: to challenge elections?

Because the strength of ERIC is based on as many states as possible participating, the system is weakened each time a state exits. If those states wanted to make changes in how ERIC operates, they could have proposed doing so. But what they really want to do, it seems, is to muddy up elections.

“It is a playbook for autocrats to reduce public trust in elections, and ERIC was an instrument that was improving public trust,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told us.

Some states that have pulled out of ERIC are talking vaguely about creating a replacement. But any system those states create would lack ERIC’s highly sophisticated data-matching technology. ERIC replaced other systems that were a total mess, marred by data breaches and identifying separate individuals in different states with the same name as the same person. Who really wants to go back to those days?

Some election officials who work to clean up voter rolls suspect the real motivation here is to disrupt voter registration rolls in a way that can be used to challenge any future elections that produce results the people pushing to quit ERIC don’t like. So much for election integrity.

“[Quitting ERIC] doesn’t make any real sense on the issues,” one of the early proponents of Illinois joining ERIC told us.

Weaponizing efforts to make voter rolls as accurate as possible is just another effort to undermine democracy. Many Republican officials who had praised ERIC before it became politicized now are bad-mouthing it. For example, when Florida joined ERIC, Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was “the right thing to do.” Now, he has taken his state out of the system.

Americans should stop and think about how fortunate they are to live in a nation where individuals still have the right to vote in fair elections. Then, they should do all they can to protect that right at a time when it is under assault.

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