There Are More Reasons Than Ever to Exit ERIC
A steady drip of new information is giving states new reasons to leave David Becker’s tainted Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Which is the next to go?
Some of the Left’s secret weapons hide in plain sight. It took conservative watchdogs close to a decade to reveal how the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) for what it is: A partisan tool for helping the Left target and turn out new Democratic voters at a huge scale under the cover of winnowing states of ineligible voters. Now that the word is out, states are ditching the compact in favor of their own secure alternatives.
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We’ve proven that non-ERIC states have cleaner voter rolls than do ERIC member states. That’s not by mistake—ERIC was created with funding from the left-wing giant Pew Charitable Trusts to bloat voter rolls, not clean them, in service to winning elections for Democrats. How? By dramatically remaking our country’s electorate through precision registration campaigns, which are only made possible with the data ERIC acquires from states and shares with the far-left Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR).
Take it from ERIC founder David Becker—now the head of CEIR—who boasted in 2018 that “[ERIC] is the single most effective voter registration drive in the history of the United States.”
Restoration News was also the first to document Becker’s absurd “democracy summit” in May, when Democrat attendees blasted Republicans as “election deniers” and “fascists” who were “desecrating the halls of Congress.” That hate masks their fear—for once, the Left is running scared.
As red states have become aware of these facts, they’ve wisely decided to dump ERIC for a safer and more effective option: Sharing key voter roll data with one another instead of using a middleman. To date, nine have left, most recently Texas and Virginia. There’s reason to believe more will soon follow.
Gaining Ground
In September, Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill to force the state out of ERIC. The bill is likely to pass the Republican-controlled legislature, but not Gov. Tony Evers’ (D) desk, and Republicans are just shy of a veto-proof supermajority in the Assembly. Wisconsin will hold its next gubernatorial election in 2026, so exiting ERIC is a stretch until Republicans control the governor’s mansion.
Things look better in purple Pennsylvania, where Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt sent a letter demanding ERIC cease sharing its data with “non-governmental third parties” (read: CEIR).
Why does that matter? CEIR receives data on tens of millions of eligible-but-unregistered individuals sifted from the ERIC database. This gives CEIR, a partisan advocacy group funded by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, unprecedented access to information on potential voters—an electoral goldmine to the Left, since conservatives don’t share the same access. Accessing this otherwise off-limits data was the reason ERIC was incubated in the first place; without it, ERIC ceases to be valuable to Democratic operatives.
In Pennsylvania, that damage is incalculable heading into the 2024 presidential election.
What about Alaska? In June, the state’s Republican Election Director announced Alaska would remain in ERIC while exploring alternatives over the next year. Then a federal court ruled that the state must release ERIC data on deceased individuals under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the result of a lawsuit by the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation last year. That’s certainly an improvement over the current obfuscation ERIC forces on member states.
Moving Forward
Yet there’s no reason Alaska shouldn’t go further in safeguarding its voters by withdrawing altogether. As of September, 8 states have crafted a ready-made alternative.
That compact includes Ohio, Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, whose secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, is a close ally of David Becker and ERIC. It’s evidence that states don’t need ERIC or any other third-party to trade information necessary to keeping their files accurate. So when will more states join?
Republicans control Utah and the Kentucky secretary of state’s office. Exiting ERIC would be an easy victory for conservatives in both states.
Georgia and South Carolina should be top of the list. All of their neighbors have left ERIC (or in North Carolina’s case, prohibited itself from joining in the first place), so there’s no value in remaining in a compact whose members don’t even share a border with the Peach State.
Election integrity activists have already done the heavy lifting. All that’s needed is courageous lawmakers who are committed to securing their elections. Who will step up?
