Right-Wing Activists Are Pushing States to Use Their Voter Roll Purging Software

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

In September, Wisconsin’s Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen — an especially vocal denier of the 2020 election results — filed a lawsuit against her state’s Elections Commission. The aim of her legal challenge is to force the state to sever its ties with a formerly obscure nonpartisan entity: a multistate information sharing partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).

The lawsuit, because it’s predicated on a series of minor technicalities, is unlikely to succeed; it will in all likelihood remain a minor shot across the bow of Wisconsin democracy. But this is only the latest salvo in a sprawling and long-escalating right-wing campaign to force states out of ERIC, dismantling a key bulwark of fairness and legitimacy in electoral systems. The steady success of that campaign has ensured that, as the presidential election draws near, ERIC will be absent from the field in several critical battleground states.

More concerning still, several other software programs with dubious methodologies have arisen to fill the void, rife with questionable practices and evidence of right-wing biases. At this fever-pitch moment in the run-up to the presidential election, the influence of such roundabout bureaucratic voter suppression methods cannot be discounted.

A Collaborative Solution

ERIC was created in 2012 by electoral officials to facilitate interstate voter roll information sharing — a major challenge for a highly mobile population. Accurate voter registration lists are therefore a linchpin of U.S. democracy. Before ERIC, it was much more difficult to track voter deaths, interstate moves and other relevant changes. Because ERIC’s systems, uniquely, have access to confidential federal databases like motor vehicle department records, the system is able to effectively collate vast reams of information.

ERIC was until fairly recently an uncontroversial, widely lauded and bipartisan tool, common if not ubiquitous, sharing information between more than 30 states. However, in the last few years, a relentless smear campaign has spurred several states to abandon the system. Right-wing groups have found an effective wedge point to intervene at an essentially benign structural mechanism in the nation’s democratic architecture.

Voter suppression ideologues have found great success in influencing high-level state officials on the matter, often leaving election overseers (many of whom had no say in the decision), scrambling to replicate ERIC’s flexible and powerful tools. Rather drastic decisions to retreat from ERIC entirely at the state level have proliferated across the country since 2022, when Louisiana became the first state to abruptly sever ties. It was followed by eight others: Alabama, Virginia (one of ERIC’s founding states), West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Florida and Texas. Nonmembers Oklahoma and North Carolina even passed laws forbidding future membership.

Conjured-Up Controversy

Remarkably, the Louisiana departure and ensuing controversies are all traceable to a set of baseless January 2022 articles in The Gateway Pundit (a sensationalist reactionary outlet, enormously popular with Trump supporters, that has a long history of publishing demonstrable falsehoods). This misinformation charged that ERIC was funded by George Soros and was “a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up.” Without evidence, ERIC’s efficacy, security and nonpartisan motives were called into question — over the organization’s protestations and rebuttals.

The considerable early success in Louisiana was replicated elsewhere over the next year and a half. State officials, even those who had previously lauded ERIC with high praise, suddenly found themselves executing a heel turn. When Florida joined ERIC in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis praised it for “reduc[ing] the potential for voter fraud” and “protecting election integrity.” Then, in spring 2023, Florida’s secretary of state justified leaving ERIC for its “partisan tendencies” and improper data privacy. Later that year, in June, Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate announced his state’s separation from ERIC — a mere month after he had called it a “godsend.”

American Oversight is a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog that, via public records requests, first shed light on the causative role of The Gateway Pundit and the real election denialist actors behind the later state departure campaigns.

“American Oversight’s investigation uncovered thousands of pages of public records, including emails and communications showing that the same people involved in sowing distrust in U.S. elections were also working behind the scenes to influence the multistate exodus from ERIC,” Amanda Teuscher, director of communications at the watchdog group, told Truthout by email.

Earlier this year, American Oversight released a campaign to educate the public about the targeting of ERIC; it has also synthesized reports on the vast network of voter suppression efforts in its 2024 Anti-Democracy Playbook. As Teuscher noted, “Records we obtained also show that in several cases, officials knew that ERIC was reliable and that the attacks on ERIC were inaccurate, but caved to that far right pressure campaign anyway.”

“The same people involved in sowing distrust in U.S. elections were also working behind the scenes to influence the multistate exodus from ERIC.”

Here’s the most absurd irony of this case: ERIC is, in fact, one of, if not the single greatest, bulwarks against actual voter fraud — or, rather, voter system errors, as genuine fraud is so vanishingly infrequent as to be completely immaterial. At minimum, by allowing for interstate roll comparison, ERIC fixes inaccuracies and mistakes and ensures that people who have moved states don’t vote in both their former and present districts.

As a result, the fevered assaults on ERIC are resulting in what is, for state electoral officials, a deeply self-sabotaging trend. But these attacks are not purely senseless. ERIC, by reaching out to eligible but unregistered voters, helps to maximize democratic participation; as such, there is a ruthless logic behind its dismantling. The real calculations behind the move attest to the willingness of today’s Republican Party to admit no limits to its grasping for power.

The claims against ERIC, of course, resonated with the numerous other unsubstantiated right-wing electoral conspiracies — fraud, illegal voting, and other myths — that have been churned up into a reactionary froth. As Teuscher pointed out, “The misinformation campaign around ERIC” has “foment[ed] distrust…. That distrust can be used to push for more restrictions that will make it harder for people to vote — especially people of color, college students or marginalized groups.” It also prepares the ground for a pre-emptive contestation of any Democratic win.

After all, opposing ERIC is only a small facet of the vast voter suppression campaigns that Republicans are fielding: from legislation, lobbying, lawsuits and influence campaigns to throwing various wrenches in the democratic works, up to and including intimidation and veiled threats. This is not merely the work of fringe denialist elements. The leading organization of the voter suppression network is the Republican National Committee (RNC). (And Trump himself has posted on Truth Social more than once to call for more red state ERIC withdrawals.)

Because their policies are so woefully unpopular, generally speaking, if fewer votes are cast overall, more of those who abstain will be likely Republican opponents; therefore, the better the outcome for the right. But eliminating ERIC not only shrinks the voter rolls — it opens up a vacuum that can promptly be filled by roll maintenance systems that have been programmed by entities with highly suspect motives.

The Wheel, Reinvented

In the absence of ERIC’s capabilities, a broad set of interests have leapt to furnish substitutes — with many having blatant ties to election denialists. American Oversight was able to obtain “documents detailing states’ efforts to find viable replacements or data-sharing agreements” after leaving ERIC, said Teuscher. Many of the suggested replacements pose a threat to voting rights. “Public reporting and documents uncovered by American Oversight have shown the deluge of voter registration challenges being fueled by these supposed replacements.”

The challenges Teuscher mentions constitute a vast, multilayered campaign to contest voter rolls in swing states by abusing voter challenge laws. The new replacement software programs are empowering self-appointed activist “election investigators” to attempt to knock (often marginalized or minority) voters off the rolls based on fallacious evidence.

As CNN reported, an app called IV3, created by an “election monitoring organization” called True the Vote, is designed to make it easy for vigilante roll cleaners to submit dubious complaints — over half a million of which have been made so far. These “challenges have been riddled with errors and have at times included vulnerable groups, such as people registered to vote at assisted-living facilities and homeless shelters,” according to the CNN investigation.

Serving a similar function is the Voter Reference Foundation and its website VoteRef.com. Run by the head of the Arizona Republican Party, the site consolidates roll data for wannabe “election investigators” to peruse and challenge. VoteRef databases also supply an information harvest for the most prominent ERIC alternative: a program called EagleAI NETwork, which is pronounced, evidently, “eagle eye.”

Its functions are as dubious as its moniker. Built with funding from right-wing dark money networks like Donors Trust, EagleAI claims to survey datasets and flag “suspicious” voter registrations. The program works by accumulating scattered data, from sources as varied as “the National Change of Address Registry, ‘Google scrapes,’ business records, and property tax records,” and highlighting supposed inconsistencies. These “may or may not constitute evidence” of ineligibility.

EagleAI has received financial and operational support from the Election Integrity Network (EIN), an organization closely linked to the RNC and a thicket of significant right-wing power networks. EIN is led by Cleta Mitchell, a major player in right-wing election denialism and a former legal adviser to Trump during his desperate attempts to cling to power in 2020. Mitchell and the EIN also proved instrumental in the initial push to withdraw from ERIC, as a Documented investigation has shown.

EagleAI offers features that both allow users to easily challenge voter rolls via autofill forms and a few clicks and to vet those same challenges — generating a circular and self-substantiating process, in “an ouroboros [of] disinformation,” as one activist put it. In addition to being error-prone, all of this potentially contradicts a number of laws around voter challenges. Ultimately, the program’s greatest anti-democratic potential may lie in its ability to overwhelm electoral systems with tens of thousands of groundless complaints.

NBC quoted Blake Evans, the Georgia elections director, as saying that, “EagleAI data offers zero additional value to Georgia’s existing list maintenance procedures.… EagleAI presentations … are confused and seem to steer counties towards improper list maintenance activities.” Nevertheless, EagleAI won a contract in Georgia’s Columbia County, and has been used to generate ostensibly suspicious voter lists that were investigated by Florida’s director of elections.

Wherever ERIC has been renounced, similar troubles persist. After withdrawing from ERIC, the state of Alabama has scrambled to replace its data collation capacity. Its answer, the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID), is now burdened with attempting to essentially replicate the same functions while saddled with innumerable weaknesses, as experts have noted: far more haphazard access to data, inadequate security measures and the absence of an established software infrastructure. This month, AVID partnered with Kentucky to compare rolls for accuracy — precisely the role ERIC had already served. Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and others had already found themselves obliged to enter similar information sharing agreements.

Electoral officials in several other states are also left with the same unenviable task: finding some substitute for ERIC’s prolific capabilities, in hopes of stemming the function losses resulting from the self-inflicted wound of its abandonment. In fact, previously unreleased documents obtained by American Oversight and reviewed by Truthout shed light on the Virginia Department of Elections’s efforts, still ongoing, to construct a makeshift ERIC surrogate in their state. The internal communications from department commissioners, which were sent in June 2023, a month after the state’s withdrawal, offered a look at the department’s hiring needs — namely, software developers for database work — and their high-level project planning for an ERIC substitute program, which, officials remarked, demanded a considerable “scope and level of effort” and a “high workload.”

Virginia is not alone in the monumental task; once again, the other states that have abandoned ERIC have the same difficulties on their hands. In what could well prove the most consequential system transition yet, this week, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson told KHOU 11 that her state is “very close to having a replacement. We are doing everything that ERIC did. We’re just doing it in many different ways.”

Nelson promised, “This upcoming election will be the most secure election Texas has ever had.”

Muddying the Waters

Whether or not the Brandtjen suit has any impact on Wisconsin’s ERIC membership — a very unlikely prospect — now that election season is coming to a head, the loss of ERIC may be keenly felt in swing states. The undue challenges and potentially illegitimate roll purges that have been conducted in ERIC’s absence will produce disenfranchisement that most heavily affects marginalized voters, students, and other groups — many of them likely to vote against Republican candidates.

The right knows this. Whether by actively stealing the chance to vote from eligible people on the rolls, by making the voting process more obstacle-ridden and inefficient, or by tarnishing the public confidence in the process to delegitimize electoral results they dislike, the overarching ambition of these vast, nationwide efforts is anti-democratic disenfranchisement. Just how deep a wound the loss of ERIC and other right-wing malfeasance might inflict on democratic processes this November remains to be seen.