Do you know ERIC?
ERIC is the acronym for the Electronic Registration Information System. This is a voluntary private organization to which states belong through the membership of state election directors – generally the Secretary of State. This organization was founded for the purpose of adding massive numbers of Democrat voter registrations in Republican states.
NOTE: Graphics and information in this post are taken from the ERIC website and Reports available from that website as of 1/15/2024. www.ericstates.org
Increasing Democrat voter registrations at taxpayer expense is not what they told everybody when promoting ERIC. What they told everybody was a lie. And the lie was this ERIC will help you identify invalid voter registrations so you can remove them from your state voter registration database. Maybe Bait and Switch is a better characterization. ERIC was never touted as a way to seek out new voters. It was always touted as a tool to “clean up” voter rolls.
They failed to tell voters and citizens that ERIC was forcing States and counties to spend taxpayer money for marketing to uninterested potential voters, who were actually more likely to vote Democrat. (This is a statistically demonstrable fact, based on precinct location, income level, past voter turnout and other personal demographics).
ERIC was ALWAYS a taxpayer funded voter registration drive intended to increase Democrat voter registrations – ESPECIALLY in predominantly Republican States.
Read on, and then decide for yourself.
The screenshot above is what ERIC says about its work: 60 MILLION potential voters identified.
In their 2017 Annual Report, ERIC states that it identified 8 million inaccurate voter registrations. In the same time frame (2012-2017) ERIC identified 26 million potential voters who were not registered. Compare that with the 60 million potential new voters ERIC is reporting in 2024.
Which of those two results seems to be the INTENT of ERIC?
So, if you deduct the in state moves from the 8 million inaccurate records that ERIC identified, that leaves only 2 million moves to another state – 1/10 of the number of potential new voters that ERIC identified. In other words, ERIC suggested adding 10 times more voter registrations than suggestions that the registrations were innacurate (POSSIBLE removal).
What would YOU conclude is the REAL purpose of ERIC?
Looking at the data represented in the graph above, you can begin to see the deliberate misrepresentations of the results, and the purpose of ERIC.
Out of 8 million inaccurate records identified by ERIC in its first 5 years, 6 million were moves within the state. ERIC was TOTALLY unnecessary for locating these. Federal law requires a central state database of voter registrations. States have had the ability to monitor moves within their states – if they chose to do so.
It is not clear from the graph above whether “duplicate” records were in the same state or in multiple states. But, the number is minimal, compared to other segments. States have had the ability to identify duplicate voter registrations within their own database – if they chose to do so. (Another ambiguity is the possibility that a death in another state could be double counted as a death AND as an undocumented move).
Also, it is not clear from the graph if the deceased voters had died within the state where they were registered to vote or if they had died in another state. State Health Department records should show Election Directors who had died within their own state. (Florida improved this process in 2023 Legislation).
Moves out of state might be a little harder to detect, but using NCOA, a US Postal Service database of address changes, would help with this process. Also, Real Estate transaction records, Property tax records, and Driver License records can be made available for this purpose – giving a clue to moves out of state.
For more background on ERIC, here is another source:
Gaslighting from Soros-backed MLG on election integrity reaches new levels
This article explains some of the initial funding and founders of ERIC, and their Left Leaning connections and purposes.
ERIC helping to remove or update inaccurate voter registrations is only part of the story.
The Contract between ERIC and its members requires member states to expend taxpayer money to identify and inform potential voters who are not registered. While this appears on its surface to be a worthy objective. You need to ask WHY are these voters NOT registered? The actual answer is not because they have been “disenfranchised.” It is because they disenchanted with the political system, content to leave it in the hands of others.
The people targeted by the ERIC system were not interested in making an effort to register to vote. They don’t register because they are not interested in actually voting. This leaves their ballots susceptible to outside influence and manipulation (whether legal or not).
We have two big problems with voter registrations. One is that people move and don’t amend their address on their voter registration, whether moving in-state or moving to another state. The second problem is that people die and don’t update their voter registration after they’ve died. Obviously, somebody else has to tell the Supervisor of Elections that the person has died. But, if this does not happen, the voter registration remains. This problem becomes more difficult when a person has died in a state different from the one in which they are registered to vote. Election Directors have access to death records within their own state. It is a little more difficult to get records from another state.
NOTE: Florida Law states that although the County Supervisor of Elections is responsible for the accuracy of voter registration rolls, they DO NOT have to acknowledge recommendations from citizens about deaths, moves or other ineligible voter registrations.
There are also two Big Lies by omission here. First, if they really wanted to make the ERIC system work, they would have had 50 states involved, not just 30. And those 50 would include New York and California, two states which have never participated in ERIC. You might ask why they don’t participate. My opinion is that those two states were already predominantly Democrat leaning states, so there was no benefit to their participation in ERIC. Secondarily, I suspect that they knew the voter rolls in those two states were already bloated with ineligible voters that they did NOT want to remove.
The second Big Lie by omission is that ERIC is not the only way that states can improve accuracy of Voter Registration Rolls. There are a number of procedures that states COULD implement that would help improve Voter Registration Roll accuracy. The US Postal Service maintains a database of address changes called NCOA (National Change of Address). An entry in this database is a strong indicator that a voter has moved. Every county in Florida, and probably every other state also, has a database of property owners and property tax payers. Comparing these databases with the Voter Rolls should not be a difficult process. The Driver License database should also be regularly compared with Voter Rolls. Also, one of the best ways to check both residence and mailing addresses is the service that all delivery agencies use: CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System). This is a data product and service of the US Postal Service. Also, on a more local level, Postal Carriers and Postmasters are aware of who actually lives at residences. There should be some way for the Postal Service to share data with Florida Supervisors of Elections for the purpose of improving accuracy of Voter Registration Rolls. Finally, the US government has data that it could and should share with states – Social Security, passport, and immigration records. There is one final method to use for cleaning voter rolls: states share data on a number of topics. They could easily form a sharing agreement that functions without expenditures, and would not require states to seek out new potential voters.
Florida, along with several other states, withdrew from the ERIC system in 2023. That was easy to do – because participation in ERIC was a contract, not a statutory requirement. The Florida Secretary of State had the authority to terminate the ERIC contract at any time. Unfortunately, the enabling legislation, the law that allows Florida to participate in ERIC, remains on the books, the Florida statutes. We could be back in the same organization, or a different organization doing the same thing tomorrow – without any additional input from the Governor or the State Legislature.
One of the claims underpinning state withdrawal from ERIC is that ERIC has been taking, by agreement from the States, private information from Driver License data, and sharing that data with other states – in violation of state law.
Read about Florida exiting ERIC:
NOTE: Florida’s Secretary of State, Cord Byrd, (stating to me personally, and I believe also publicly) that Florida has been using ERIC “differently,” but, to my knowledge, he has never explained what “differently” means.
Points to Remember
- ERIC was ALWAYS a taxpayer funded Democrat Voter Registration Drive
- ERIC suggests substantially more additions than deletions
- Key Democrat states were NEVER members of ERIC
- ERIC was NEVER necessary
The Florida Legislature, in its 2023 Session, made changes that made the process easier for Supervisors of Elections to move Inactive voters from Active status. After the law went into effect in July 2023, nearly 1,000,000 voters were removed from Active status in Florida.
In Lake County, Active Republican registrations dropped from 122,000 to 107,000 – approximately 12%.
