The Real Reason Conservative States are Leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center
The United States has no centralized voter registration system. States and local election officials are those primarily tasked with managing who is registered to vote.
A gap in states’ registration systems occurs when someone moves across states lines, but does not notify local election officials that they moved. There used to be no way for election officials to identify such people. Typically, this means that people stay on voter registration rolls thereby wasting money spent to do outreach to them. In the worst case, a person may be able to vote twice — a very rare phenomenon — without a means to detect their illegal activity.
A solution to this problem is a compact between states known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC for short. ERIC members share their state voter registration files with each other so they can identify people who move across state lines and nab people who attempt to vote more than once in two different states. ERIC does more. States also share their drivers license databases, which allows states to conduct voter registration drives among unregistered but eligible voters, known as EBUs in ERIC-lingo.
ERIC only sends back to states lists of individuals identified as EBUs who have not been previously contacted by states. In a way, the EBU outreach requirement is a backstop to ensure states are compliant with the federal “Motor Voter” law (a.k.a. the 1993 National Voter Registration Act or NVRA for short). Motor Voter requires states to provide registration opportunities at drivers license and public assistance agencies. If persons who interact with a drivers license agency are offered voter registration at that time and are entered into the state’s databases shared with ERIC as such, then they are not considered an EBU.
This is the deal struck by Democratic and Republican ERIC member states: states get cleaner voter registration rolls which reduces waste and fraud and they must also do voter registration outreach. This compromise worked for a time, with both Democratic and Republican states joining to improve elections across the country.
Recently, Republican states started bailing out of ERIC. There has been much reporting about conservative states’ justification for leaving ERIC — with ERIC being portrayed as a liberal conspiracy with the requisite boogey man pulling the strings. It is easy to find quotes from state election officials and a certain prominent Republican presidential hopeful from just a couple of years ago touting ERIC even now as they disparage it.
Look, I love snarky clickbait as much as anyone. But this reporting buries the real, substantive reason why Republican states are leaving ERIC: they do not like the EBU outreach requirement.
A source of mine in the ERIC room — I’m no reporter but I know some folks, so take this for what it is — tells me that Republicans raised their concerns at an ERIC meeting in February of this year. A straw vote was held and there was apparent unanimous agreement that the EBU reports should be optional — not mandatory — for member states to act on. This would have kept the Republican states in ERIC.
However, in a formal vote, one of the Democratic state members rallied the (majority) Democratic states to oppose making the EBU report optional. Republicans did not like being told what to do by their Democratic peers.
At the March 17 ERIC meeting, as the coalition of ERIC states was in the midst of shedding Republican members, the meeting devolved thusly:
At the last board meeting, on March 17, members voted on a collection of changes to ERIC’s bylaws that had been proposed by Republican states, led by Ohio’s LaRose. Among other things, he wanted to remove ex-officio members from the board and make ERIC’s requirement that states reach out to unregistered voters optional. Only his proposal about ex-officio members passed, and Ohio and Iowa announced their departures shortly afterward.
Georgia Secretary of State Reffensperger offered a compromise, but it failed. But Georgia will remain in ERIC.
Georgia is an instructional state to consider because it is a Republican state that has no plans to leave ERIC. Why?
Over the years, I’ve been involved in numerous lawsuits against Georgia about how it manages voter registration, and we’ve defeated policies like exact match and restored registration for tens of thousands of eligible people. So, believe me when I say I am a skeptic of how Georgia conducts its elections.
That said, Georgia has a fairly modern data infrastructure system of automatic voter registration managed through its Department of Driver Services. It has its flaws, but it is capturing that eligible people are being offered voter registration. These data are shared with ERIC, and these people therefore do not make it on the EBU list since they have been offered registration in compliance with Motor Voter.
So, what are the states leaving ERIC really concerned about? Some have highly decentralized election administration and they do not have robust data sharing infrastructure between DMV and election officials. None have automatic voter registration like Georgia.
Seen in this light, the ERIC debate boils down to whether or not ERIC is the proper mechanism to further Motor Voter compliance.
We know states do a poor job at implementing Motor Voter. Democratic states are even guilty, too. For example, I was involved in a successful NVRA compliance lawsuit against Massachusetts for failing to provide voter registration opportunities to people at public assistance offices. This is one among many such lawsuits over the years.
I do not believe that ERIC is the best way to enforce Motor Voter. It is through the Department of Justice or other third party organizations taking legal action. In the case of Massachusetts, the public assistance offices were disguising they were out of compliance by saying everyone was already registered (a ridiculous claim). No EBU report would have identified the bad data generated by the government agencies.
It is probably too late, but I would hope the Democratic states will rethink their position, make the EBU report optional, and welcome the Republican states back to ERIC. Each state’s cleaning of voter rolls improves as more states share data. There is no EBU mandate for states that leave ERIC, so welcoming Republican states back only improves election administration.
I know Republicans will crow about how the Democratic states backed down. They may be unwilling to consider rejoining because they’ve drank the deeply from the conspiracy Kool Aid cup and it’s hard to wash that out of the mouth.
If it is a consolation, Democratic states perhaps have a victory, too. It may be that by virtue of leaving ERIC, we now have a good sense of which states are suspect of being out of NVRA compliance.