Voter rolls group gives personal data to ‘politically driven’ organizations: Report

EXCLUSIVE — The Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonpartisan group tasked with ensuring clean voter rolls for 25 states, shares voter data with politically left organizations, according to a new report.

The Washington Examiner reviewed a report detailing ERIC’s performance by the Foundation for Government Accountability, which found that ERIC was both not maintaining clean voter rolls and has helped liberal organizations use state funds to register likely Democratic voters.

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“When you think about registering voters, you think of political parties or political candidates doing that,” Michael Greibrok, FGA senior research fellow and report co-author, told the Washington Examiner. “Here you have the state being forced by ERIC to essentially do voter registration drives, and you could think of it almost as a political donation from taxpayers to the political parties and candidates.”

ERIC, which was created in 2012, is funded and governed by 24 states and the District of Columbia, all of which are members. The “nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization” says it helps those states maintain accurate voter rolls, detect illegal voting, and register eligible unregistered voters.

However, FGA’s report showed ERIC shares data collected by states with third parties like the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which pumped millions of dollars into Chan Zuckerberg efforts, otherwise known as “Zuckerbucks,” to increase voter turnout disproportionately in blue districts during the 2020 election.

ERIC’s founder, David Becker, is the executive director of CEIR and once called ERIC “probably the single most effective voter registration effort in history.” Report co-author Kristi Stahr, a senior data analyst at FGA, described the world of civic tech organizations as “a pretty incestuous group.”

Stahr explained how ERIC would share information, including demographic data, with third-party organizations, which she said “should have nothing to do with a voter registration effort.”

Greibrok went on to say that demographic data such as race and age can be used in a variety of ways to achieve political ends, including picking and choosing which eligible, unregistered citizens to contact in order to register them.

“Why do you care whether voters are 22 or 63, other than younger voters tend to lean left?” he said, adding that the data can be used to “make sure states use their funds to reach out to them and encourage them to register.”

For example, an organization like CEIR can be sent voter data by ERIC and procure mailing lists for citizens who they would like to be contacted for voter registration solicitation, Greibrok explained, and that list will be sent back to the state. Membership in ERIC requires that the state send out those mailers using taxpayer dollars.

“There is a data privacy issue of information that is not available to the public, and the public doesn’t know it’s being given out,” Stahr said. “So voters aren’t being told, ‘Hey, we’re basically selling your data for this membership fee to this third-party organization that’s going to use it to register voters.’ That’s a huge problem.”

“We see from where they’re working, their political leanings, we see from their leadership, their political leanings: They’re really responsible for who gets contacted, who may not get contacted,” Greibrok added.

Nine states, including Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, Iowa, and Texas, have left the organization in the past two years.

“ERIC is a bipartisan organization that operates in a nonpartisan manner,” ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin told the Washington Examiner. “We valued the states that resigned, but we will continue to work on behalf of our remaining members in improving the accuracy of America’s [voter] rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”

While voter data and political interests are one issue the report pointed out, another is the lack of clean voter rolls across the country. According to the report, 43.8 million Americans moved homes in 2021, but only 5.1 million were removed from voter rolls for moving out of the jurisdiction. Another 4.8 million voters were removed for failure to return confirmation of registration. An additional 3.3 million registered voters died that year.

Stahr explained that cleaning voter rolls is not just important for presidential and congressional elections but for races for school board, county supervisor, and district attorney elections that can be decided by significantly thinner margins.

“You can move down the street and it’s going to change your voter registration,” she said.

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The report urges more states to leave the organization, favoring internal voter roll maintenance.

“To maintain up-to-date and accurate voter rolls, states should stop outsourcing voter roll maintenance efforts to politically driven, third-party groups like ERIC and instead follow the lead of other states that are using their own tools to achieve clean and accurate rolls,” the report stated.