DeSantis wants to target voter fraud. So why did Florida leave ERIC?

TALLAHASSEE — Earlier this month, Secretary of State Cord Byrd announced Florida was leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, putting an end to a more than three year relationship.

ERIC is a data-sharing partnership between a majority of states with a goal to keep voter rolls accurate. The relationship had looked promising at its start.

“Joining ERIC is the right thing to do for our state as it will ensure our voter rolls are up-to-date and it will increase voter participation in our elections,” said Gov Ron DeSantis in an August 2019 press release. “We are confident that by improving the accuracy of our voter rolls, we will reduce the potential for voter fraud.”

Florida says bye to ERIC:Florida pulls out of voter registration group

Florida joins, touts ERICFlorida joins multi-state voter verification system, Gov. Ron DeSantis announces

Like most relationships, ERIC requires a give-and-take: Florida contributes its voter data to other states and gets other states’ voter data in return. 

That collected data isn’t particularly sensitive, coming from voter registration and motor vehicle licensee data, according to the program’s website. But that data is important, as identified by DeSantis in his 2019 statements. Being able to cross compare it with other states’ helps election officials identify people who have died or moved and if someone is registered to vote in more than one state.

In the break-up announcement, Florida cited security concerns and accused ERIC of not addressing “potential partisan leanings.” Byrd said he “lost confidence” in the program for not making changes to fix those alleged issues. Missouri and West Virginia announced they were leaving the program on the same day.  Alabama and Louisiana had already left, and a couple other conservative states have followed Florida.

Byrd, in an interview with One America News, claimed without evidence that ERIC “may have” leaked data to third parties that was then “used for partisan activities.”

The comments come after more than a year of false claims by far-right critics, including former President Donald Trump and other election conspiracists, that ERIC data is being used to help liberal groups.

In an early March letter, Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, defended the program, saying it followed widely-accepted security protocols.

“We will remain focused on our mission by providing our members with actionable data they can use to keep their voter rolls more accurate, investigate potential illegal activity, and offer voter registration information to those who may need it,” he said.

Byrd, meanwhile, said in the OAN interview, “Nothing stops us from continuing to share that information with sister states who value voter integrity.” 

Voting rights advocates have blasted the decision, accusing the departing states of caving to conspiracy theories and saying the states leaving ERIC are losing out on a valuable way to maintain accurate voter rolls. They point out how this accuracy not only prevents the rare cases of voter fraud but also has a slew of other benefits, such as reducing the risk of people getting mistakenly purged from those rolls.

“There’s no way for Florida to do what ERIC does on its own or even in collaboration with other states,” said Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Voting Rights Program for the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s by far the most effective tool we have, and it’s not replaceable.”

Which leads to another thing Byrd didn’t provide information about: how the state will make up for its departure. 

Mark Ard, spokesman for the Department of State, said in an email, “Even with the withdrawal from ERIC, the establishment of the Office of Elections Crimes and Security in 2022 has given Florida the resources and ability to continue to investigate, review and make criminal referrals for instances of double voting.”

But a January report from that very office said that ERIC allowed it to identify approximately 1,177 voters who voted in Florida and another state in the same election.

How does Florida identify all those people without ERIC? 

The value of the program becomes clearer when reviewing emails the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida obtained from elections officials through a public records request.

ERIC and the ‘citizen election integrity analyst’

It started on June 4, 2021. A Friday. 

An unnamed person with the email address “toteslegitvotes@gmail.com,” a self-described “citizen election integrity analyst,” sent an email to the Florida Division of Elections and its then-director, Maria Matthews.

The email listed names of people the citizen analyst found looked like they could have voted in both Florida and New Jersey. 

Time passed. More than a year. Then, in early August of 2022, the citizen analyst sent another email with names to the state. Matthews sent that on to counties the same day. Then, a few weeks later, Matthews sent the 2021 list to county election officials, saying, “It has just come to my attention that this particular attached email from totes legit might not have been forwarded last year as I thought.”

She advised the supervisors to take steps to identify potential double voters between the two states and report them to the Office of Election Crimes and Security.

But why wasn’t this found before? Florida was in ERIC, after all. Well, New Jersey hadn’t been. The state didn’t join until August 2022.

“New Jersey is not yet a full participating member of ERIC so these would not have appeared on the ERIC Voter Participation Report for 2020 GE,” Matthews said.

If one state not sharing its data created problems for Florida, what happens now with Florida losing the program’s ERIC access to all of the other participating states?

This is especially relevant now, as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced a couple weeks ago that a woman had been arrested for allegedly voting in Florida and New Jersey: Donna Prentes Brady, 66, of Ocala.

A FDLE spokeswoman didn’t answer if ERIC played a role in the arrest, though she said the case started as a citizen complaint. (The citizen analyst said over email the complaint didn’t come from them and denied an interview request.)

“Our investigation remains active and we have provided the information that is available at this time. I can tell you that FDLE has a variety of investigative techniques and tools that can be utilized in all of our investigations,” said Dana Kelly, the department’s communications coordinator. “Many cases stem from credible citizen tips, and we encourage citizens to report suspected election crimes to FDLE and to the Department of State’s Office of Election Crimes and Security Unit.”

The governor’s office referred questions about Florida’s departure to the Department of State.

Yet, preventing and punishing it is a frequently-touted goal of DeSantis. Will he be less equipped to meet that goal moving forward?

USA Today Network-Florida government accountability reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. Twitter: @DouglasSoule