But they’re cagey about saying so
A friend who knows I’m into this sort of esoterica sent along this tale of GOP insincerity in its fight to restore confidence in an electoral system Republicans have worked for decades to undermine. Their particular election bogeyman shifts with the season. It’s dead people voting this time, double voters the next, voter impersonation, rigged machines, stuffed ballots, etc., and Black people. Always Black people.
“Election integrity” means Republicans always win, dontcha know. Each GOP loss spikes complaints, demands, and election law tweaks meant to boost integrity by tilting the playing field more in their favor.
An organization created to identify double voting, bad addresses, dead voters. etc., and to make election officials’ jobs easier is the once-obscure, nonprofit voter list maintenance consortium named the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Or it was obscure until a three-part “expose” in January 2022 by Gateway Pundit that I wrote about in March. The post went viral on Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump’s Truth Social. Gateway Pundit alleged that ERIC is a George Soros-funded “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls,” the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote. “If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC.”
Um, no. Since then, eight states have exited ERIC under pressure from the usual assortment of conspiracy theorists and election deniers who vote in primaries. Republican candidates who want to shine-up their MAGA bona fides see ERIC as a target of opportunity, NPR reports.
“It’s this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC,” said J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, “that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish.”
The Gateway Pundit posts drew on Adams’ criticisms of ERIC (NPR):
In late 2021, Adams appeared on a conservative radio program and called ERIC “diabolical.”
His voting advocacy law firm has sued a number of states for records related to ERIC. And he even wrote what’s believed to be the first article ever alleging a connection between Soros and ERIC, back in 2016. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money previously to The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped start ERIC, but Soros has never had any involvement in the organization.)
In an interview with NPR this year, Adams said he never intended his criticisms to lead to states actually leaving the organization.
“My view is that it’s better to be in ERIC than not in ERIC,” Adams said, because without it, “it’s absolutely impossible to do cross-state checking to see who’s voting twice in federal elections.”
But that assumes that the GOP’s election integrity crusade was sincere.
NPR’s report offers a useful history of how the organization originated that’s worth your review.
At its height, the partnership had 32 members, almost evenly split between the two major parties. The program helped officials clean up voter rolls and remove dead voters, which attracted Republican states like South Carolina, Utah and Texas.
“The ERIC program for us has been godsend,” said Iowa Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, in an interview with NPR earlier this year.
It also required states to reach out to eligible voters who weren’t registered yet, with a postcard explaining how to register. That helped attract Democratic states, like Connecticut, Oregon and, most recently, New Jersey.
“I had various conversations with my fellow secretaries, who gave positive and I want to say bipartisan feedback at the time,” said New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way, speaking about how she learned of the program.
But MAGA attorney Cleta Mitchell heard about the program, too. Mitchell was deeply involved in the Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “open-source investigator” worked on the discredited election audits in Maricopa County, Arizona. At a secret ERIC summit Mitchell held last June, Honey presented a 29-page report calling ERIC a “threat to election integrity.”
The real threat conservatives see (and my interest) lies in those postcards ERIC members send to potentially eligible but unregistered citizens. For conservatives, removing dead voters, etc., was the carrot for states to join ERIC. For liberals it was the voter registration outreach. Now that they are aware of it, conservatives want out. ERIC is “bloating the rolls.”
“The impact of ERIC is that instead of cleaning up our voter rolls … they add more people to it,” Honey said. “People who aren’t even interested or disengaged don’t really want to register. But they just, you know, you ask them enough times, they’re going to say yes.”
Can’t have that. Insert “people of color and young people” whenever a GOP operatrive complains about registering people “who aren’t even interested or disengaged [and] don’t really want to register.”
“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a father of movement conservatism and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a religious right group in Dallas during the 1980 campaign. Plenty more where he came from still hold that belief and work every election to limit access to the ballot to the right people.