There’s nothing like ERIC

Be careful what you seek to destroy, Republicans.

With some Texas Republicans pushing the state to abandon one its best tools for preventing voter fraud — a coalition of states that share voting roll data to weed out duplicate and suspicious registrations — the secretary of state’s office is trying to discern if it can build a replacement.

But the effort could easily stall or take years, experts say. Similar efforts in other states over the past two decades have not worked, or have been shut down, because they lacked bipartisan support from multiple states and access to the kind of national data that produces accurate cross-state voter list matching — all of which the Electronic Information Registration Center, or ERIC, spent years developing.

The push to have Texas become the latest state to withdraw from ERIC, a long-standing effort by nearly 30 states, is rooted in a yearlong misinformation campaign that spread through right-wing media platforms and advocacy groups.

If the state decides to leave the program but fails to produce a similar tool, Texas’ voter rolls will inevitably be less accurate, which could fuel claims of voter fraud, experts say. That could increase costs for counties who’d be more likely to send election mailers to voters who have moved out of state or died, because outdated information would linger on the voter rolls. And the state, too, would spend more than it would save by leaving the program because it would need to build the technical infrastructure and meet the federal security requirements needed to protect sensitive data in order to make an alternative viable.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, declined to comment on the feasibility of developing a new alternative to ERIC. He told Votebeat, however, that at least Georgia and Nevada — states that are currently members of ERIC and supportive of the program — and Oklahoma have expressed interest in working with Texas on the project. Taylor said research is also underway on the cost of developing such a system.

In no small part, experts note, the coalition ERIC built over many years worked, because member states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — agreed to come together in a good-faith effort to share the necessary data and information to help maintain voter rolls across state lines. But in recent months, political pressure on Republican-led states has put the coalition at risk. Last year, Louisiana, then Alabama, followed by Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, and most recently Ohio and Iowa, announced they would depart. Texas could be next: The Texas Legislature is already considering various bills to leave ERIC.

And the state’s attempt at replacing the program both would not be an efficient solution and could have implications for the states that remain in ERIC by making it harder for states to join together across party lines, said Marc Meredith, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration. Meredith has also done research on voter list maintenance.

“It would be incredibly disappointing to end up with basically two versions of the same thing because the value of data grows exponentially as you can make more and more comparisons between states,” he said, and added that by leaving the program, Texas will deprive itself of all the other states’ data while preventing the other states from obtaining data on more than 16 million registered voters in the state. “It’s not like if you split the world and have 25 states in one [program] and 25 states in another, [it] would be equally good. It’s actually more than double the bad.”

See here and here for the background, and read the rest for more. To be clear, there are plenty of worse and more damaging things that the Republicans have teed up for this session. It’s just that this is such a clear example of a perfectly working thing that Republicans want to destroy because a few reality-denying crackpots hate it for completely unhinged reasons and none of the rest of them has the guts to push back. In its place there is nothing that comes close to matching what it does, there are no tangible plans for even a stopgap solution at hand, and the most likely long-term solution is something that will be measurably worse. And this is a thing that furthers one of their supposed top priorities! It’s like being a fossil fuels advocate and also seeking to pass laws to ban fracking and refineries. I got nothin’.

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