Texas latest state to leave election fraud protection group
AUSTIN — Texas began its exit from a national voter verification program Thursday, becoming the latest Republican-led state to leave an election fraud protection group in an effort driven in part by conspiracy theories.
Christina Adkins, director of elections for the Texas secretary of state’s office, submitted a letter Thursday to the head of the Electronic Registration Information Center indicating that Texas will resign from the organization. Texas’ partnership with the group, also known as ERIC, will cease in 91 days, according to a copy of the letter provided to The Dallas Morning News.
It would bring an end to a partnership that led the state to identify about 100,000 voters who moved out of state and were eliminated from voter rolls. Votebeat first reported Texas’ resignation from the multistate partnership.
Texas joins Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia as states to have ended agreements with ERIC recently. Kentucky is also considering leaving the group.
ERIC is designed to protect against interstate “double voting,” in which a voter casts ballots in multiple states. Using a combination of identifiers, the group flags voters who have moved out of state but never canceled their voter registration in their previous state.
The continued exit of member states from the organization in part fueled the secretary of state’s office to pull the plug on the partnership Thursday.
“As fewer states participated in ERIC, the costs were set to increase,” Alicia Pierce, spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, said in an email. “Texas would be paying more for less data.”
Additionally, a law is set to take effect Sept. 1 that makes the partnership with ERIC under the current terms illegal.
“It’s unfortunate Texas has chosen to withdraw from ERIC without a tested and trusted system to replace it,” said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at the voting rights advocacy group Secure Democracy USA. “ERIC was created by election officials, for election officials, to ensure accurate and up-to-date voter rolls all across the country.”
ERIC came under scrutiny after some conservative activists accused the group of being a partisan tool backed by liberal megadonor George Soros. The group was founded by member states that pay dues to participate in the programs voter cross-check system.
Texas appropriated $1.5 million to join ERIC in 2019 and pays $115,000 annually to maintain its membership. Texas was the largest member state, and its exit could imperil the nonpartisan voter fraud protection group.
“ERIC will follow our Bylaws and Membership Agreement regarding any member’s request to resign membership,” ERIC director Shane Hamlin said in an email. “We will continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”
Despite the program’s success, some Republicans bristled at the group’s requirement for participating states to mail out postcards to eligible but unregistered voters. Some conservatives view the organization as a backdoor to register left-leaning voters.
Texas’ exit has been months in the making.
In March, Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced that Texas would create its own voter cross-check program. It was the first major policy move from Nelson, a Flower Mound Republican and a former state senator appointed to the position in January. It signaled that the office remained focused on election fraud, which has been at the forefront of conservative politics since the election of former president Donald Trump in 2016.
In May, the Legislature passed a bill that limits the costs of Texas’s participation to $100,000 and doesn’t allow other voter cross-check organizations to require Texas to perform registration outreach.
Texas is required by state law to participate in a program, but no analogous voter cross-check program to ERIC currently exists. Politico reported in early June that eight GOP-led states that recently quit ERIC were in talks to create a successor program but that those states might be forced to conduct 2024′s presidential election without those safeguards in place.
“Withdrawing Texas from ERIC early and without a tested alternative is a dangerous and unnecessary distraction from what our state’s chief elections officer should be doing: making it easier to exercise our right to vote,” said Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager at election advocacy group Common Cause Texas.
Election fraud and interstate ”double voting” is rare, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Pierce, spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, said the office is “researching options.”
“There is no immediate plan to join another system,” she said.
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