Texas Republicans want out of a national program that targets voter fraud

Officials have hinted at the state’s impending exit from the Electronic Registration Information Center for months, and senators heard testimony on a bill last week that would clear the way for Texas to leave the program. The initiative launched in 2012 and had more than 30 member states at its peak, helping local governments identify voters who moved, died or had duplicate registrations.

Texas Republicans say they want to replace ERIC with their own program, but it’s unclear how long it would take to develop and how many states would join.

“Many Texans and folks across the country — but in particular, Texans — are concerned about the security of voter information flowing to this national organization, also about the high cost associated with it,” said state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, as he introduced Senate Bill 1070 last week.

Texans are “also concerned that it’s just not leading to significant progress cleaning the voter rolls,” he said. 

ERIC had long enjoyed bipartisan support — but a number of GOP-led states are now leaving the program, heeding the calls of conservative activists and politicians who question its efficacy and reliability. There are partisan motivations, too: Former President Donald Trump last month posted online that all red states should exit the cooperative, calling it a “terrible Voter Registration System that ’pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”

The system’s backers say those allegations are unfounded and rooted in misinformation campaigns — and that leaving ERIC could ultimately harm the state’s efforts to safeguard elections. But Republicans say they still want a system to flag duplicate registrations, and Texas officials are in the early stages of forming their own version of ERIC.

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If legislators move forward with the proposal, Texas would be the sixth Republican-led state to exit the cooperative since January 2022. Three states, including Florida, left last month.

It would also be the largest to leave, as Democrat-led California and New York have never been members.

Instead, the secretary of state’s office is working on an alternative program, and “a number of states have already expressed interest in that,” Hughes said. Secretary of State Jane Nelson last month moved Keith Ingram, then the director of the elections division, into a new position to “develop and manage an interstate voter registration crosscheck program.”

The office did not respond to a request for comment seeking additional details about the state system.

When Texas became the 30th state to join ERIC in March 2020, state officials and voting rights advocates lauded it as a bipartisan cooperative that would help ensure the accuracy of Texas’ voter rolls and increase voter participation.

“Through this outreach, our state will continue to foster an active and engaged citizenry by encouraging all eligible Texans to play an active role in our democratic process,” Ingram said at the time.

GOP criticizes $1.5 million price tag

Voting rights advocates and experts say the program has been wrongly tainted by misinformation and conspiracy theories accusing ERIC of pursuing a left-wing agenda and sharing personal data with unauthorized parties. The state Republican Party passed a resolution last month urging Texas to leave, mostly citing privacy and security concerns. 

Shane Hamlin, the executive director of ERIC, published an open letter last month hoping to combat those narratives. He said the organization uses “widely accepted security protocols for handling the data we utilize to create the reports.”

“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,” Hamlin wrote.

Chad Ennis, the director of the secretary of state’s forensic audit division, said at a Texas Public Policy Foundation panel last month that ERIC is the only way to easily find voters who are registered to vote in two states. Officials used ERIC data in the previous six months to remove more than 100,000 people from the voter rolls who were doubly registered, he said.

“States leaving ERIC and creating their own independent registration system increases the potential for election fraud,” Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, testified last week. “The GOP and conservatives for years demanded the kind of results ERIC has produced, and states withdrawing from the compact undercut efforts to keep voter rolls clean and prevent illegal voting.”

Ehresman has also questioned whether Nelson’s office could run its own system. She pointed to the office’s botched voter roll purge in 2019, when then-Secretary of State David Whitley used faulty data that questioned the citizenship of tens of thousands of Texas voters.

The staffers who worked on that effort “are probably not the people we want to create a new system for maintaining voter rolls,” Ehresman said.

SB 1070 and its companion, House Bill 2809, do not name a successor to ERIC, nor do they explicitly require the state’s exit from the program. They do, however, implement conditions that would make it difficult for Texas to continue its membership — primarily by limiting the cost of participating in such a compact to $100,000 in initial fees and $1 per voter flagged.

The Texas Legislature allocates $1.5 million a year to participate in ERIC. The state paid $25,000 to join in 2020, and annual membership fees — calculated using population figures — amounted to roughly $75,000 at the time, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said.

Last year, as Texas’ population surged, the state paid about $115,000 for its membership. The other funds were used to print and mail about 368,000 postcards to eligible but unregistered voters that ERIC identifies, which is a membership requirement, the spokesman said.

Lucy Trainor, the election integrity director for the state Republican Party, testified that the latter mandate “creates a national voter registration drive funded at taxpayer expense.”

State Rep. Jacey Jetton, a Fort Bend Republican who authored HB 2809, said the high costs are his primary concern. As it stands now, the initiative “just does not give enough return on investment for the state,” he said.

Jetton said he is not advocating for any specific vendor to replace ERIC and would be open to maintaining a membership if the state could negotiate a better contract. 

The ultimate goal of the legislation, he said, is to create “appropriate guard rails” around any program that deals with election security. The measure would also require the secretary of state to give the Legislature a report about the program every quarter.

“Leaving ERIC without a plan to participate in a different program leaves vital information on the table,” Jetton said. “The Legislature should empower the secretary of state to participate in a program with more clarity around what information is shared and how private data is protected. The cost should also be reasonable.”

cayla.harris@hearst.com