Editorial: In service to Trumpian vote-fraud mythology, Missouri invites the real thing
Missouri has joined four other Republican-led states withdrawing from a bipartisan multistate compact designed to address potential vote fraud by ensuring that when voters move from state to state, they aren’t registered to vote in both. While there may be some legitimate concern that the nonprofit compact — the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC — has taken its mission beyond voter verification to promote voter registration generally, that’s hardly a damning indictment.
What’s actually driving the red-state exodus, it appears, is the election-denial wing of the GOP, which is flinging around its usual baseless conspiracy theories. Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s decision this month to pull out is especially curious, given that he has for years claimed (with zero evidence) that vote fraud is a major problem in Missouri. Yet now he’s abandoning a process that can actually prevent it.
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Ashcroft, like so many in his party, has long promoted the myth that double voting, voter impersonation and other insidious methods of deliberate election fraud are common and pose serious threats to election integrity. In fact, there’s no evidence that these things happen on any significant scale today.
Still, there are valid reasons for Missouri and other states to coordinate ballot cleanup efforts, which is the whole point of the ERIC system. When voters move out of one state where they are registered to vote, and register in another state, it creates a situation where a voter could illegally vote in both states. A multistate data-sharing system that weeds out those double registrations not only guards against this rare form of fraud but ensures that states’ voter rolls are kept up to date and not clogged with names that shouldn’t be on them.
The ERIC system was created in 2012 and eventually served about 30 states, both red and blue. What has changed recently isn’t the system or its work but the wider political landscape, especially on the right. Allies of former President Donald Trump have claimed (without evidence, as usual) that the system is a front to boost Democratic voter registration. Ashcroft has specifically criticized a requirement that participating states send voter registration information to eligible voters who aren’t yet registered. But that’s a promotion of democracy, not of Democrats.
The decade-old fact that some of the original ERIC seed money came from Pew Charitable Trusts, which has also accepted unrelated funding from liberal billionaire George Soros, is irrelevant — but the mere mention of Soros’ name today is enough to set the tinfoil hats of the political right a-buzzing.
Here’s the takeaway that cannot be stressed enough: In their determination to legitimize false Trumpian election-fraud conspiracies, Ashcroft and his fellow defectors have opened the door to the real thing. Voters of all stripes should remember that whenever these folks insist their overriding concern is election integrity.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page editor Tod Robberson discusses the Editorial Board and how decisions are made.
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