ERIC and Its Impact on Utah Election Integrity

By O. Krauss, February 9, 2024

There has been some news lately about the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and what it does, but mainly because a number of states have cut ties with the organization in the last year. Why is ERIC significant and why should Utahns care about this organization?

ERIC was founded as a non-profit in 2012 by the Pew Charitable Trusts under the direction of David Becker. The organization collects voter data from participating states and purports to help maintain voter registration rolls. The stated mission is to “help states improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls, increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens, reduce election costs, and increase efficiencies in elections”. Utah, along with Colorado, Washington, Nevada, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware were founding member states. Membership grew to 32 states in February 2023 and then quickly shrunk as 9 states have left (so far) after discovering the ulterior motives of ERIC.

ERIC member states pay an initial $25,000 fee upon joining, and annual dues are between $26,000 and $116,000, depending upon the state’s population. As an example, Utah paid $49,000 for 2023. The arrangement between member states is to provide voter registration rolls and Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) data to ERIC to help identify ineligible or inactive voters. During its existence, ERIC claims to have found 2.5 million voters who moved across state lines, about 203,000 duplicate voter registrations, and about 65,000 deceased voters. Of these numbers, ERIC identified about 261,000 that moved out/into Utah, 27,000 duplicates, and 6,100 deceased. Encouraging voter registration is also a key focus of the organization, having identified more than 60 million eligible but unregistered (EBU) voters (among member states alone). This is a staggering number, considering that ERIC is only a 3-person organization.

These goals are seemingly innocuous enough and in a way noble, encouraging people to participate in the voting process. The way these goals are achieved however, is questionable. The data that ERIC requests from the states is to be submitted every 60 days, while information regarding inaccurate voter registrations from ERIC to the member state is to be provided at most once a year. If a state fails to request it, ERIC will send it “automatically” after 425 days have elapsed. ERIC has no teeth with regard to enforcement of voter roll cleanup either. There’s no requirement for a state to actually remove the ineligible voters, only that they initiate contact with the voter in question within 90 days of receiving the data. So what is a member state to do with the data it receives from ERIC? Well, the bylaws state that the data is not to be used for anything but the administration of elections and if a request for this data is received (say by concerned citizens), it is only to be granted if there’s a court order compelling it, with a copy provided to ERIC.

In addition, the bylaws explicitly state that “Under no circumstances shall the Member transmit an individual’s record where the record contains documentation or other information indicating that the individual is a non-citizen of the United States.” Wait a second – isn’t one of the reasons voter registration rolls are verified is to see if a registered voter is an actual citizen of the United States, and not some other country? This was recently put into practice in Colorado during Sept 2022, when Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office mailed postcards to 30,000 non-citizens and encouraged them to register to vote! This mailing occurred after the department received data from ERIC of 102,000 unregistered Colorado residents, and then compared it against state residents with driver’s licenses. Coincidentally, this also occurred in Sept. 2020 on a smaller scale, encouraging non-citizens and dead people to register. The evidence is damning and begs to question the motive for acquiring non-citizens information from DMV records.

ERIC’s bylaws also violate the public disclosure provision of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) as 52 USC Section 20507(i)(1) states “Each state shall maintain for at least 2 years and shall make available for public inspection… all records… for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.” Didn’t ERIC’s bylaws state that a member state is to disclose data only after being threatened with a court order? Even though ERIC states are using the bylaws to hide their list maintenance data, at least four of the states have been sued by the Public Interest Legal Foundation to make the data open to public inspection.

There are other federal voting laws that need to be looked at as well. The outsourcing of voter registration list maintenance to a third party entity violates the Vote Act (52 USC Section 21083), which specifically states that “The appropriate State or local election official shall perform list maintenance with respect to the computerized list on a regular basis.” This violation prompted the Thomas Moore Society, when it sued Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in late 2022 for their contracts with ERIC. List maintenance by a third party also violates the NVRA, which states that “The fact that the applicant has declined to register will remain confidential.” (20504(c)(2)(D)(ii)) Finally, voter list maintenance also violates the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (18 USC 2721), which prohibits DMV data from disclosure to 3^rd parties. The reason ERIC wants DMV data is specifically because it includes data about people who declined to register when getting or renewing driver licenses.

In light of all the violations of Federal law, what exactly does ERIC do with the data it receives from member states? Well, since 2016 it’s been secretly providing it to another non-profit organization, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). Coincidentally, it was also founded by David Becker, who is the current Executive Director. Recent emails uncovered by VerityVote show that CEIR has been receiving voter data from ERIC for analysis and compilation of the EBU reports. Furthermore, in at least two instances CEIR is explaining to state election officials that these reports will be sent to ERIC, who then will forward to them as a formality. The staff at CEIR also direct state election officials on how to handle EBU reports, even to the level of which unregistered voters get mailers (and in what order). Why are state elections officials being told by a private non-profit on which voters to target, and how?

Besides laundering data through ERIC since 2016, why should we be concerned about CEIR? The purpose of the organization was to stop foreign meddling in US elections and the supposedly low turnout in 2016, and focused in 2020 to counter the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on general elections. In August of 2020, Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg granted $69.5 million to CEIR (among other election-related organizations he donated to) to help with “protecting elections”. This may not mean much unless the amount is put in context – CEIR’s entire 2017 revenue was only $890,000. CEIR then distributed about $64 million in grants to 23 states to fund “urgent voter education assistance”. The largest recipients were Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Georgia, New York, and Arizona, who used most of the funds for paid media campaigns targeting people identified in CEIR’s EBU reports. Coincidentally, 4 of the 6 largest recipients were also battleground states in the 2020 election. Not to be outdone, Michigan specifically spent $11 million of the $12 million it received on fees to Democratic consulting firms to conduct supposedly nonpartisan voter education. So to put all of this into perspective, we have ERIC member states gathering data at taxpayer expense, which is then passed to CEIR for analysis and EBU identification, and then acted upon by mostly Democratic states after receiving millions of dollars in grants that were funneled through CEIR by a rich liberal donor.

While on the topic of funding, it behooves us to examine the finances of ERIC as well. We know that initial funding (~$139,000) came from the Pew Center on the States, which just received $500,000 from The Foundation to Promote Open Society to support Pew’s “voter registration modernization initiative”. Since it’s no secret that this foundation is a leftist George Soros funded organization, ERIC operating fund sources were quickly transitioned to the taxpayers of ERIC’s member states in the form of membership dues.

It’s time to look into who David Becker is, and why he cares so much about ensuring that states voter registration rolls stay “clean”. After all, he founded two organizations that at its height were handling over 200 million voter registrations in the United States. From 1998 on, he worked as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). He was the lead counsel in Georgia v. Ashcroft, where he successfully convinced lower courts that Georgia violated the Voting Rights Act in its redistricting. But in 2005 he received an ethics complaint from coworkers after he contacted the City of Boston and offered his services to defeat a lawsuit that his very own department brought against the city for voting rights violations. According to coworkers Brad Schlozman and Hans Spakovsky, he “couldn’t stand conservatives” and “his emails uncovered in the Boston investigation revealed nasty, disparaging remarks about Republicans. Very unethical and unprofessional.” After the ethics complaint he left the DOJ and worked as a campaign director and lobbyist at People for the American Way, (PFAW) who according to InfluenceWatch is a left-of-center advocacy group whose policies include path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, public funding of abortion providers, and tax and spend big government budgeting”. PFAW reports that they have “deep expertise in fighting the Right” – it’s no surprise then that Becker left his experience at PFAW off his LinkedIn page. In 2008, he joined the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he became director of election initiatives. This is where he and others at Pew concluded that the biggest flaw in the US electoral process was inadequate voter registration. They concluded that the nonprofit sector would have to take a leading role in place of Congress. This is how ERIC was created in 2012, basically an off-shoot of Pew with Becker at the helm. After founding ERIC and CEIR, Becker also became a CBS news contributor, even joining fellow News Correspondent Major Garrett in 2022 to publish “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie” which claims the 2020 election was “the most secure, verifiable, and transparent in American history.” 

Now that the architect behind ERIC and CEIR has been introduced, we need to examine the 9 states that left ERIC between Jan 2022 and July 2023. Ohio’s Frank LaRose, along with other Secretaries of State, objected to the forced participation in EBU harvesting and the continued reliance on non-voting board members of ERIC (like Becker), Virginia’s Susan Beals objected to the sharing of voter data with other organizations for partisan purposes and the lack of confidentiality of voter information. Missouri’s John Ashcroft was even bolder, stating that ERIC refuses to address multi-state voter fraud, has an obsession with EBU harvesting, and allows a hyper-partisan non-voting individual (Becker) on its governance board! Due to the exposure of ERIC by the Gateway Pundit in 2022 and the resulting departure of six states, Becker resigned his board membership at ERIC in March of 2023, while still maintaining his position at CEIR. Three more states (including Texas) followed the exit from ERIC over the next five months. Shane Hamlin, the ERIC representative from Washington, replaced Becker at ERIC and he immediately sought to reassure the remaining states that ERIC is not partisan and is being subject to “recent misinformation”.

So what exactly are the accomplishments of ERIC over the 12 years of its existence? An investigation conducted by Judicial Watch in October 2020 revealed that there are 8 states whose statewide registration rates exceed 100%, with seven of the 8 being longtime ERIC members. Examples include Maryland, which had 12 of 23 counties over 100% and Colorado, which had 40 of 64 counties exceeding 100% registration. The worst offender for inflated voter rolls was Wisconsin, which had a full 7.1 million voters on its rolls out of a population of 3.68 million eligible – a rate of 193%! So how did a state’s voter rolls become so outrageously inflated, in spite of being a member of ERIC? And isn’t the primary goal of ERIC to identify duplicate, moved out of state, ineligible, or deceased registered voters?

One has to look in depth at the person in charge of Wisconsin’s Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS), data specialist Sarah Whitt, who ran the system from 2005 to 2019. During her 14 years of tenure, she combined the county databases into one statewide database and refused to clean the rolls, duplicated voter entries (in some cases up to 25 IDs for a single registration), leaving fields blank for voter names, and “stuffing” registrations into apartment buildings (an example being 290 voters registered at a 16-unit bldg.). To top it off, leaked interviews with county clerks showed that it only takes 2 mouse clicks to “activate” a dead voter before an election. It’s also interesting that when a group of 1500 citizen volunteers across Wisconsin started uncovering these practices in 2019, Whitt departed SVRS and got hired by ERIC as the new “Systems and Data Specialist”. So apparently, the state with the worst voter rolls and the leader over that system gets rewarded with a job at ERIC, overseeing over 200 million voter registrations in 32 states!

Another of ERIC’s three employees is Shane Hamlin. Along with Becker, he was instrumental in getting ERIC off the ground in 2012. He is ERIC’s current Executive Director, and is also Washington state’s Assistant Director of Elections, whose state still has 14 of 39 counties with registrations above 100% per the JW investigation. Hamlin has been over the state’s voter registrations programs since 2011 and initiated the state’s 100% mail-in ballot elections since 2012. Shouldn’t the state’s voter registrations have gotten cleaner during those 13 years of Hamlin’s oversight instead of getting even more inflated?

Further investigation by JW of the most populous US counties over a 4-year period (2018 – 2022) revealed that only a maximum of two voters were removed by each county. These were counties like Sacramento, Queens, Brooklyn, Fresno, Bronx, Richmond, and New York (Manhattan). Out of the 11 states examined which contain these counties, 5 were members of ERIC. As a result of these impossibly low numbers, JW sent warning letters to the county recorders & clerks for failure to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters” due either to death or change of address.

Litigation is nothing new to JW. In fact, the organization has sued multiple states to force Secretaries of State and Lt Governors to clean up voter rolls as required by the National Voter Registration Act. Where ERIC has failed, Judicial Watch lawsuits have succeeded. To date, over 4 million ineligible voters have been removed from California, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Oregon, and Illinois voter rolls.

So what is the significance of ERIC to Utah? Since all this information was exposed in 2022 and 2023 by various media outlets, calls grew from the public and Utah’s legislature for the state to withdraw from the system altogether. Ryan Cowley, Utah’s Elections Director in the Lt. Governor’s office, has been defending Utah’s participation, and even created a flyer and a video to instill confidence in ERIC. He states in the flyer that “Utah has an exemption from what is known as the EBU report” or the voter registration info that ERIC so desperately wants from each state. Reading further on at the bottom of the page we find out that the exemption was only granted on December 8, 2023 (less than 2 months as of the writing of this article) – meaning that the state has been sharing this info for the previous 10 years! He also states that the non-voting ex officio board members that caused other states to leave ERIC were removed from the governing board. This is stretching fact, when it was only one board member (Becker) and he resigned on his own per his publicly available resignation letter. Cowley goes on to state that since 2013, ERIC has identified 260,936 voters who were also registered in other states, 6,085 deceased voters, 26,712 duplicate voters, and 381,293 moved within the state. There are a couple bullet points that speak to how some of this data cannot be done without ERIC. So how many of these 675,026 errors were actually corrected in the 11 years of Utah’s membership within ERIC? The flyer makes no mention of results.

While the Lt Governor’s office is not making results of statewide voter roll clean-up efforts public (would require a court order per ERIC’s bylaws), at least one group within the state has attempted to shed light on the matter. The Utah Voter Verification Project, a group of grassroots volunteers headed up by Elaine Moore canvassed addresses in 6 Utah counties (Washington, Utah, Iron, Davis, Cache, Box Elder) in 2022 w/the goal of verifying county voter records. Several hundred volunteers went knocking on doors asking some questions about the voter’s last election experience. Out of 3,211 addresses and 6,655 voters contacted, approximately 13% (671) had issues:

o   200 lost votes

o   68 vote method mismatches

o   26 ghost votes

o   164 ineligible voters

o   135 ineligible registrants

o   96 addresses w/extra ballots

Lost votes are votes that never got recorded with the county, ghost votes are votes getting recorded for people that didn’t vote or are deceased, method mismatches are the way a vote was recorded (mail, in-person) that didn’t correspond to the actual casting of the ballot. When the data was presented to several of the county clerks (that agreed to even discuss the findings), she was told that voters “…are not to be trusted in these matters”, and one clerk even threatened to file legal action against her for gathering this information. Shouldn’t the counties be thanking these volunteers for spending their own time in going out and verifying the records?

A cursory examination at Weber County’s voter database revealed that of the fifty oldest inactive individuals on the rolls, 15 have died per publicly posted obituaries. While it is true that two of the deceased were from 2023 and 2024, the rest of the deaths were from as far back as 2010, most being in the 2010s. Granted that this was a cursory sample of inactive voters, it’s still an error rate of 30%. In addition, there were two 16-year olds and six 17-yr olds also on Weber County’s rolls. A law passed in 2021 (HB12) requires the Lt Governor to provide Social Security data to county clerks regarding deceased individuals, as well as death data within Utah from the registrar’s office. The county clerks in turn, are required to remove deceased voters within 10 business days of receipt from the Lt. Governor’s office. In light of these samples amongst Weber and a handful of other counties, you’d think that existing state law and the annual data from ERIC should be sufficient to clean the state’s voter rolls. So why aren’t they - how many years does it take for the counties to remove dead voters?

Further examination of US Election Assistance data by Verity Vote in late 2022 revealed that states that are not participating in ERIC are actually more effective at identifying and removing voters who move out of a voting jurisdiction, approximately 21% better vs. ERIC member states. This was based on 2020 Election Administration and Voting Surveys (EAVS), which every state is required to complete. It’s not that much better than ERIC states, but nevertheless helps to paint a picture that ERIC is not very effective at cleaning voter rolls.

Based on this research, one has to wonder why Utah has been a member of ERIC for so long, an organization staffed by leftist agitators eager to swell the voter rolls of member states, while cleverly branding ERIC as a non-partisan organization that “helps states improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls” and “increase efficiencies in elections”. The data already speaks for itself, in that ERIC is a data-mining operation for leftist organizations like CEIR, having identified 60 million new voters and forcing states to enroll them through registration drives, while identifying only 2.5 million that moved across state lines, requiring no action on the part of member states to remove duplicate or ineligible registrations. This data is then leveraged by at least one rich liberal billionaire through CEIR to help swing elections his way. Combined with the fact that ERIC is violating numerous federal laws, Utah should not only be withdrawing from this corrupt organization but should be suing ERIC and CEIR for mishandling Utah voters’ registration and DMV data for partisan purposes. The Lt. Governor’s and Attorney General’s office both state that they care about election integrity – now is the perfect chance to show that they care by withdrawing Utah from ERIC and taking a much-needed objective look at this organization disguised as a voter roll clean-up enterprise.

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