Can Republican States Build Their Own Voter Verification System?
More importantly, will they?
Supporters of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the embattled organization that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate, will take all the wins they can get these days. The state of Alaska just handed them one.
ERIC was designed as an opt-in system for states to share and update voter roll information automatically, cutting down on multiple registrations and opportunities for fraud. But Republicans, led by former President Trump, have demonized it as a get-out-the-vote effort favoring Democrats. Breaking the pattern of other Republican-led states, Alaska opted to stay in ERIC’s interstate compact after eight GOP-led states pulled out.
On paper, ERIC’s sharpest critics ostensibly agree with the system’s goals. The biggest, most credible organization pushing ERIC withdrawal is the Heritage Foundation, which keeps a thorough database of instances of voter fraud. A private, invitation-only conference the foundation co-sponsored earlier this year likely influenced Virginia’s departure from ERIC. Heritage suggested that if ERIC—that is, the states that have opted in to it—don’t make the changes they suggest, the states that are leaving ERIC might form an alternative to carry forward its cause of clean voter rolls on their own terms. It’s not clear they’ve worked out how—or even that an alternative is possible before the 2024 Presidential election.
“Until another tool is available that can provide the same or enhanced services, the division will continue to participate in ERIC,” said Timothy Montemayor, the spokesman for the Alaska election division. That’s the thing: There really is no alternative to ERIC, and building a realistic alternative to it in the 17 months between now and the 2024 election appears close to impossible. The Republican states that withdrew from ERIC, spurred on by Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, are limiting their own ability to maintain clean voter lists with up-to-date information from other states.
Former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson told The Bulwark that the Republican states “could build a second system”—a diminished clone of ERIC—but it would take money and expertise. But the obstacles in even the area of planning and coordination would be formidable. For instance, would one state take the lead on funding, designing, and implementing the system, or would they distribute these costs and burdens, or outsource them? Grayson noted, ironically, “in the light of the anti-Zuckerbucks and Soros/Pew claims,” that philanthropists could fill the void. But which ones, and why? What billionaire or philanthropy would throw money to create a second, inferior version of something that already exists?
David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, and co-author of Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie,” which was excerpted in The Bulwark—said that even if the Republican states that left ERIC wanted to form a competitor, there isn’t enough time. “It took us three and a half years to build ERIC,” Becker told The Bulwark.
Technological problems are the least of the obstacles, he explained. Complying with state and federal laws and regulations makes getting something like ERIC off the ground a little more complicated than registering an LLC on LegalZoom:
It's gonna take more than 17 months. And the reality is, if [the ERIC-departing states] want to do good list maintenance, they need to complete that this year. Because blackout periods for list maintenance under the National Voter Registration Act are gonna start as early as around the end of 2023, maybe even earlier, depending upon when presidential primaries start.
Which means you cannot do list maintenance in the 90 days before a federal election. Many states are going to have three federal elections in 2024: a presidential primary, a primary for all other offices, and then the general. So there's very brief windows to conduct this maintenance legally in a presidential election year.
If the states that left ERIC do take any steps toward replacing it—and they might not—Becker says it will just be “post-hoc justification.” He’s already seeing this from Virginia, which won’t comment on which states it is talking to in order to recreate ERIC’s efforts.
Conservative critics would have you believe that Becker is a bogeyman. Writing a book that suggests, correctly, that the 2020 election was “the most secure, verifiable, and transparent in American history” earned him scorn from the right. Since then, conspiracy theories targeting him have entered circulation. For instance, a group associated with George Soros gave money to the Pew Charitable Trust, which initially started ERIC. Although the donation supported a different project, the semblance of a connection has still resulted in Becker being labeled a Soros shill. (His organization, CEIR, has never taken money from Soros or any affiliated organization.) The debate over ERIC in states like Alabama, which ultimately left, and Arizona, which didn’t, have been shaped primarily by this febrile discourse.
Becker’s haters got some of what they wanted: He didn’t seek another term on ERIC’s board even though he was a non-voting member. The unwarranted attacks on him became a distraction from the organization’s work, he said. A group of prominent conservatives with elections experience published a letter supporting him, but he still felt he needed to leave.
Becker points out that the first Republican-led states to depart ERIC did so before the organization’s board could vote on proposed reforms. “They didn't let it get to a vote,” Becker says. “They didn't take on their obligation to try to convince their fellow members. They just bolted.” Not exactly a sign of good faith. “You’ve gotta wonder what their real reasons are,” he says. The remaining ERIC member states later voted to eliminate the positions of non-voting board members, after a vote failed in February, before the GOP exodus.
EVEN IF ERIC DEFECTORS can write the code for a new system, and even if they can secure all the licenses, agreements, memoranda of understanding, and other regulatory approvals they need, they will still be at a steep disadvantage compared to ERIC. Consider the quality of the ERIC member states’ data pool. While political parties, candidates, and civic organizations often register voters, most of the work these days is done by the state agencies. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states plus the District of Columbia have automatic voter registration (AVR), which means that, as voters give their information to a state agency, like the DMV, the voter rolls are updated automatically, making the state’s records fairly pristine. Georgia is a good example of the benefits: The state adopted AVR in 2016, and in the 2020 election, an astonishing 98 percent of eligible Georgia voters were active and registered. That’s about 20 points higher than the national average. “If every state ran elections like Georgia,” Becker said, “we would be in a really good place.”
Only two of the states breaking away from ERIC have AVR: Virginia and West Virginia. The other six do not. That means the information exchanged among the states leaving ERIC will almost certainly be poorer than the information exchanged within ERIC, in which 17 remaining states (plus Washington, D.C.) use AVR. Breakaway states would likely need to fall back on the National Change of Address (NCOA) organization to clean up their rolls, but ERIC has far more information to prevent people from registering to vote in multiple member states. Put together, AVR and ERIC are the best system yet devised for ensuring that everyone eligible to vote is registered, that only those eligible are registered, that each eligible voter is registered in only one state or territory, and that they are registered only once.
States that left ERIC have lost access to those data. And as some in the departing states have observed, the cost of recreating ERIC is going to be far greater than it would have been to remain in the organization. And for all that, they will receive what will almost certainly be an inferior product—or none at all.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen boasted that “Alabama can police our own voter rolls . . . Paying about $25,000 a year in taxpayer money to a private non-profit organization—I think Alabama has the resources to do it ourselves.” He also cited the unfounded Soros-funding conspiracy theory while arguing against remaining in ERIC. His first act in office, last year, was to withdraw Alabama from the organization.
But Alabama, if it is trying to replicate even a small portion of what ERIC does, will spend far more on it than $25,000 a year, which is a pittance as far as state budgets go. Alabama pays its 105 state representatives twice that much per year for a part-time job. Prosecuting even one case of voter fraud costs many times as much. The stolen election lie, which Allen “cheered” on as a state representative, has cost American taxpayers over half a billion dollars so far.
If Alabama wants to recreate ERIC without spending more than the $25,000 it would have paid to stay part of the system, it would have to convince ERIC’s 33 current and former participating states to hand over their driver’s license data directly. Splitting the starting amount between all 33 yields a total of $757.58 per state. What sane state elections official would give an election denier in Alabama the social security numbers, dates of birth, and address of their citizens—all for the price of a loveseat from Ikea?
But the outlandishness of Allen and others’ positions hasn’t stopped states from leaving, and the GOP departures from ERIC have already weakened its offerings to remaining member states; the data have, in Becker’s words, seen a “modest decrease of utility” as a result of the withdrawals.
GABE STERLING, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER of the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, has talked to some of his colleagues in the states that left ERIC. “This is the frustrating part at the staff level,” he says. ”We've literally had people say to us, ‘yeah, my boss has to say some things right now that we on the staff level don't necessarily agree with.’”
Sterling didn’t want to specify which states, but offered a recommendation: “Understand that in nearly every state, the people who work at elections—be they Republican or Democrat or professionals—they want to do good election administration, but they also have to be there and support their bosses certain times, even when they think their bosses might be wrong.” While there was a domino effect among the departed states, he thinks the primary reason for the departures is clear: “People left because of misinformation.”
Is there any chance ERIC could get those states back? Sterling thinks it’s possible, if the political weather changes after 2024. “We get through an election cycle,” he speculates, and “Donald Trump drops by the wayside . . . and people say, ‘Okay, we have to get back to regular election administration again because this is a good tool.’”
Georgia, even though it’s run by conservative Republicans like Sterling, voted for Biden and Warnock and Ossoff, which might be why Republicans are wary of the state as a model for conducting elections. They think, wrongly, that eligible but unregistered voters—whom ERIC requires participating states to contact about registering—are to blame for their losses, overlooking the poor quality of the party’s candidates in those contests. It’s a convenient explanation.
ERIC was, and is, a conservative’s dream: a cheap, effective voter-fraud-policing machine. Now the system’s defectors are unarmed and alone, separated from the group by choice in a dark wood of election fraud baselessly alleged by their party’s leader. It’s almost as though they want to be lost.