The Republican-led state legislatures of Georgia and Utah are considering legislation to leave a voter roll data group, pushing back on their respective GOP state election officials who have advocated for remaining in the coalition.

A nonprofit organization called the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), was founded in 2012 and calls itself "the most effective tool available to help election officials maintain more accurate voter rolls and detect possible illegal voting."for voter roll maintenance has had nine GOP-led states leave it since 2022, with two more looking to follow their lead. 

As these state legislatures have been concerned about the group’s lack of effectiveness, Republican state election officials have claimed the organization is needed for voter roll maintenance and that there is no suitable replacement.

The membership-based group also says it helps states reach out to potentially eligible but not-yet-registered people with information on how to register to vote. ERIC was founded by David Becker, who also founded the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which in 2020 received nearly $70 million from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

CEIR claims the 2020 general election was "the most secure in American history." ERIC currently consists of 24 member states and the District of Columbia.

Since 2022, nine GOP-led states have left ERIC, amid such concerns as partisan influence, increasing costs, and a failure to address voter fraud. The states that left ERIC are Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Texas was the most recent state to leave the group in 2023. ERIC’s membership had grown to 33 states and Washington, D.C., until Louisiana began the exodus in 2022.

Prohibitions on the table

On Tuesday, a Georgia state House elections subcommittee passed along party lines House Bill 215, which would prohibit the secretary of state from “joining or participating in any multistate voter list maintenance organization that [r]equires or encourages the contacting of individuals who are not currently registered to vote with the intent to register them to vote; or [s]hares voter data outside of the explicit purpose of removing deceased, duplicate, or otherwise ineligible voters from the list of electors.”

The bill also requires the secretary of state to terminate participation in any such organization within 90 days following the enactment of the law. The House Governmental Affairs Committee is the next panel to consider the legislation.

Georgia state Rep. Martin Momtahan (R), who introduced the bill, said that because states have left ERIC, including many bordering Georgia, it has become “totally ineffective.”

Proponents

The election director for the secretary of state’s office, Blake Evans, disagrees. “ERIC is, in my opinion, the most secure and efficient mass voter list maintenance tool that is available,” Evans said Tuesday. “There’s not an organization that gives us the quality of data out there currently that we could join,” he added.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) has also long been a proponent of ERIC. In January 2024, the secretary of state’s office credited ERIC with helping Georgia officials identify 17 cases of suspected double voting in the 2022 general election, which were referred to local district attorneys.

About a year earlier, as states were leaving ERIC, Raffensperger said, “Maintaining accurate voter rolls protects the integrity of our elections. Systems like ERIC are an important tool for election administrators and help prevent people from being registered in and trying to vote in multiple states. States that prioritize best practices and actual election integrity over politics are going to stay in ERIC and have clearer and more accurate voter rolls than those that choose to leave.”

President Donald Trump in March 2023 told Republican states to leave ERIC, posting on Truth Social, “All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up. It is a fools game [sic] for Republicans.”

Raffensperger responded to Trump’s comments the following week, saying, “What [Trump] is saying is that it’s a biased organization, but it’s led by the states. If anything, if you want to politicize [ERIC]—which I don’t want to do—then you could have more Republican states join it and then change the bylaws. We’re trying to keep it to make sure it’s good data.”

Utah, another Republican-led state, is also in the process of leaving ERIC. The Utah state House passed a bill on Feb. 14th to leave ERIC, and it has been sent to a state Senate committee for consideration.

Utah state House Majority Whip Karianne Lisonbee (R) introduced the legislation, House Bill 332, which would create new requirements for the lieutenant governor to report on the accuracy of voter roll maintenance efforts. The bill would also force the lieutenant governor to withdraw the state from ERIC by July 6th, and in its place, have the option to either contract with a different third party to maintain voter rolls or enter into agreements with other states to share information.

"Garbage in, garbage out"

In Utah, rather than having a secretary of state oversee elections, the lieutenant governor has that duty.

“In many states our voter rolls are not being maintained, and when we compare our data with them through nonprofit organizations like ERIC, it’s garbage in, garbage out,” Lisonbee said as the state House considered passing her bill last week. “We’re not getting good data back and we’re not able to really maintain and clean our voter rolls.” 

Lisonbee also said that her bill focuses on following through with recommendations made by legislative auditors in a December report, which found that there were 1,400 “likely matches” to deceased voters that hadn’t been removed from voter rolls, with 700 that were marked as “active” voters. In the November 2023 election, the auditors found that ballots were cast for two voters that matched deceased voters.

While Lisonbee is looking to require the Utah lieutenant governor to leave ERIC, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R) has previously pushed back on those looking to exit the group. “ERIC has become a favorite boogeyman of the radical election deniers,” Henderson posted on X last April. “But their claims are not based in fact, and their demands are counterproductive to their rhetoric. ERIC is the only tool member states have to ensure certain things.”

Alabama has an alternative

As GOP election officials in Georgia and Utah have claimed there is not a tool similar to ERIC that would effectively maintain voter rolls, Alabama's chief election official says he created a replacement for ERIC that his state shares with other states.

In September 2023, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) created the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) to help his state and others clean their voter rolls. AVID includes partnerships with other states through a memorandum of understanding, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, the National Change of Address List, and the Social Security Death Index to conduct voter roll maintenance.

"I promised that we would develop an Alabama based solution to manage the integrity of our State's voter list. AVID is that solution," Allen said in a statement posted on the secretary of state's website.

Currently, the states of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have all joined AVID.