In the last three years, Republicans in two dozen states passed laws limiting voting in the name of preventing alleged voter fraud. At the same time, eight GOP-run states have withdrawn from the only national agency that is preventing fraud by cleansing voter rolls.
And Texas will become the ninth with Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature Sunday on the measure passed last month by the legislature.
The withdrawals follow the spread of misinformation from a right-wing website placing unwarranted responsibility for the agency on a familiar GOP target – wealthy philanthropist George Soros – and on GOP concerns that the states-created agency is encouraging unregistered Americans to vote.
Their actions provide a revealing window into the sometimes irrational responses by today’s Republican Party to Donald Trump’s repeated but unproven allegations that fraud cost him the 2020 election.
In the last three years, widespread GOP acceptance of his claims has inspired 24 states – most like Texas with Republican governors and legislatures – to pass laws that variously curb absentee ballots and early voting, make registration harder and tighten voter identification rules.
So far, nine states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), created by the states in 2012 to help resolve discrepancies in registration rolls. The voluntary consortium helps states cleanse their rolls by creating a database to prevent double voting and advising local officials when a registered voter died or moved.
At its height, it included 31 states and the District of Columbia, run by both Democrats and Republicans. Texas is the ninth state where Republican officials have withdrawn from ERIC in the past 17 months.
The exodus started after four false January 2021 articles on the Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorialist right-wing website that previously peddled such falsehoods as Barack Obama’s alleged Kenya birthplace and claims that COVID vaccines were worse than the virus. They alleged ERIC was a “a left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” financed by Soros to help the Democrats win elections.
Within days, according to a lengthy expose by National Public Radio, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin told conservative activists he was putting Louisiana’s ERIC membership on hold, citing “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports.”
The allegations stemmed from a contribution by the Open Society Foundations, a Soros-created philanthropic network, to a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which later helped fund ERIC. The connection is tenuous; neither the Hungarian American billionaire – a major Democratic donor – nor his foundation has had any direct involvement in ERIC.
Laleh Ispahani, an official with Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told CNN it gave $1.2 million from 2009 to 2011 to Pew’s Center on States division, which researched modernizing voter registration and information systems. Pew didn’t fund ERIC until 2012.
A second GOP target is David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who helped found ERIC and now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a non-profit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to help local election agencies.
Most of this is Republican politics.
In Alabama last year, GOP secretary of state hopeful Wes Allen made withdrawal from ERIC a primary campaign issue. Once elected, he followed through. Other states that have withdrawn are Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia.
In Ohio, Secretary of State Frank LaRose abandoned his prior support for ERIC while considering entry into the GOP primary for U.S. senator. He cited its failure “to embrace reforms that would bolster confidence in its performance” and choosing “to double-down on poor strategic decisions, which have only resulted in the transformation of a previously bipartisan organization to one that appears to favor only the interests of one political party.”
His decision came after an unsuccessful effort to curb ERIC’s requirement that it reach out to unregistered voters and then require the states to contact them. Republicans implied this helps the Democrats because a majority of unregistered voters lean left. Indeed, two studies showed a slight Democratic advantage among them.
Politics is also evident in Texas. In joining ERIC in 2020, the Texas secretary of state’s office said it would “assist Texas elections officials in identifying and conducting outreach to eligible but unregistered voters to encourage them to register to vote” and help “identify voters who have moved within Texas, voters who have moved out of Texas, voters who have died, and voters with duplicate registrations in Texas.”
But last March, the Texas Republican Party called for withdrawal, contending ERIC “has violated the security of Texas registrants’ data by transmitting state data to third parties, such as the Center for Election Innovation and Research, whose data practices and usage are unknown to Texas and its citizens.” Two months later, the GOP-controlled legislature and Abbott followed through.
Interestingly, one CEIR board member is Ray Martinez, president of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Texas and a former Clinton and George W. Bush administration official.
Given the lack of true voter fraud, it’s long been evident that desire to satisfy its pro-Trump base has motivated most Republican efforts to restrict voting. It’s even more evident as GOP-run states try to wreck the one agency designed to prevent fraud.
(Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.)
