This week three Republican-controlled states announced that they’re pulling out of the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC.
ERIC is a multi-state partnership that experts of both parties say is the only reliable, secure way for states to share voter registration data with each other, NPR reported.
If it’s so good, why are these states joining others in pulling out. That’s simple, the GOP isn’t interested in working to try to ensure voter integrity at the polls. What it really wants to do is cheat by purging as many Democratic voters as it can.
Yes, the party of the Big Lie is at it again.
Florida, West Virginia, and Missouri are quitting the program, leaving questions about its future and “how these three states will maintain accurate voter lists without such a resource,” NPR said.
The latter is easy to answer: They don’t want accurate voter lists, and they sure as hell don’t want something that will help them achieve accurate voter lists.
Greasing the skids to the trio’s exit has been – no surprise here – “a sustained misinformation campaign from the far Right,” NPR reported.
ERIC was founded by seven states – four of them run by Republicans – and has grown to include more than 30 states and governments across the political spectrum. Its job is to eliminate dead voters from the rolls, find the rare instances when someone illegally votes twice in a federal election, and register eligible voters when they move to a new location.
Members are able to use and share government data – from agencies such as election offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the Social Security Administration.
Sounds like a good thing, except last year conservative media began to target the organization. The far-Right publication The Gateway Pundit claimed ERIC is part of a liberal conspiracy to steal elections, setting its sights on David Becker, who helped found ERIC and is a non-voting board member, and George Soros, one of the Right’s favorite boogeymen. More attacks followed.
Last year, Louisiana was the first state to announce that it would pull out of ERIC. Alabama’s new Secretary of State Wes Allen did the same the day after he was sworn into office. Interestingly, his Republican predecessor praised ERIC, NPR reported.
Listen to what Allen had to say to NPR: His office was “putting a plan together” to keep his state’s voter registration list up to date without the data from across country that it received from ERIC
How is he supposed to do that without a resource like ERIC? Not surprisingly, the three latest states to bail out didn’t explain how they’ll maintain the accuracy of the vote lists without data from ERIC. That happens when you either haven’t thought things out or you just don’t care. I’ll go with the latter.
In fact, election officials of all political stripes told NPR that “it is essentially impossible to replicate what ERIC does,” and that states that pull out “will now have less up-to-date voter records.”
You can read the NPR story here.
Look, I don’t know enough about ERIC to claim it’s a flawless operation that couldn’t be better, but I do know that common sense says states that don’t want to use it – Republican states, remember – will find it easier to illegally purge voter rolls without its database.
And I know the corrupt Republican Party has made voter suppression one of its key strategies for winning and maintaining minority rule as our country’s changing demographics and its own extremist agenda almost ensure it will shrink – rather than grow – in the future.
Our democracy is under attack every day. Every damn day.
This is just another way to do it.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writings on the my blog: Musings of a Nobody