(Tuesday PO) 3 more Republican states announce they're leaving a key voting data partnership

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/11613744 ... t-virginia

The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is a multi-state partnership that experts across the political spectrum say is the only reliable, secure way for states to share voter registration data with each other.

But on Monday, three Republican-led states announced they are pulling out of ERIC — leaving questions about the future of a system that up until recently was a bipartisan success story, as well as questions about how these three states will maintain accurate voter lists without such a resource.

"[ERIC] is a godsend," Paul Pate, the GOP secretary of state of Iowa, told NPR in an interview last month.

But state officials in Florida, Missouri and West Virginia have joined a growing number of Republicans who don't see it that way.

The states announced in tandem Monday that they were beginning the process to pull out, after weeks of tense negotiations over potential changes the organization could make to appease GOP members who have been facing constituent pressure about ERIC, in part due to a sustained misinformation campaign from the far-right.
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Just last week, ERIC's executive director, Shane Hamlin, put out an open letter to, as he claimed, "set the record straight" amid misinformation about the compact.
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Right-wing conspiracies have a new target: a tool that fights actual voter fraud

In a press release Monday, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, an appointee of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, said the voting organization didn't do enough to secure data privacy or "eliminate ERIC's partisan tendencies."

Just weeks ago, a January report from the Florida Department of State Office of Election Crimes and Security said it had "used data provided by ERIC to identify" hundreds of voters who appeared to have voted in Florida and in another ERIC member state in the same election.

Hamlin confirmed to NPR that ERIC had received the three states' requests for resignation. "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," he added in a statement.
How ERIC came to be

To be clear, for the first 10 or so years it was in existence, ERIC operated in obscurity.

Four of its founding seven state members were Republican-run, and its membership has slowly grown to include more than 30 states and governments across the political spectrum, from the more liberal-minded Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., to the conservative South Carolina and Texas.
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The partnership allows states to use and share government data — from election offices as well as the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration — to eliminate dead voters from the rolls, find the few people in every federal election who illegally vote twice, and also register eligible voters when they move to a new place.

"ERIC started with a question to election officials, which is: If you could fix one thing in elections that would make your job better, that would enable you to provide better services to voters, what would it be?" said David Becker, who helped found ERIC while he was working at the Pew Charitable Trusts a decade ago. "Every single election official we asked ... said voter registration."

The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, even praises states for joining ERIC.
What changed for ERIC

But early last year, fringe conservative media began to target the organization — and Becker, who has remained involved with the organization as a non-voting board member.

The Gateway Pundit, a far-right publication, published in January 2022 the first of a series of articles painting ERIC as part of a liberal conspiracy to steal elections.

The two main villains at the heart of the conspiracy? The billionaire George Soros and Becker.
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Elections
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Becker now runs a separate nonprofit called the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which helped distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated to election officials during the 2020 election cycle amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Some on the right have pointed to that work as evidence that Becker is a liberal activist, though NPR spoke with numerous current and former Republican election officials who say they have worked with Becker over the years and found him to be even-handed in his elections work.
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Shortly after the first Gateway Pundit article published in 2022, Louisiana became the first state to begin the process of withdrawing its membership in ERIC, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."

Other conservative media outlets published "investigations" that implied ERIC is a taxpayer-funded voter registration drive to help Democrats, and Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who helped Donald Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, began focusing on the organization on her podcast, which is influential in election-denier circles.

A day after being sworn in in January, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen sent a letter informing the Electronic Registration Information Center of the state's exit after criticizing the program during his campaign.
Butch Dill/AP

In November, Alabama elected a new secretary of state, Wes Allen, who had made pulling out of ERIC one of his key campaign promises. On his first day in office, Allen sent a letter to ERIC's executive director, following through on that promise.

His Republican predecessor had praised ERIC.

In a recent interview with NPR, Allen said his office was "putting a plan together" to keep his state's voter registration list up to date without the data from across the country the state previously received from ERIC.

But election officials from across the political spectrum have told NPR that it is essentially impossible to replicate what ERIC does, and Alabama and Louisiana will now just have less up-to-date voter records.

In their separate announcements on Monday, Florida, West Virginia and Missouri did not explain how they will maintain the accuracy of their voter lists without data from ERIC.

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

Gorge Soros is the best boogie man of politics. The Koch brothers need 2 to reach his level of fright.

[Tarmaque]

Gorge Soros is the best boogie man of politics. The Koch brothers need 2 to reach his level of fright.

I know, right? There's basically little difference in what he does and what the Koch brothers do. It's just that he's on the other team. This infuriates those with a certain kind of mind. "How DARE they use our own tactics against us?!"

[Slip Shod]

The Koch brothers were/are never trumpers. They used their money against him. Trump called them joker globalists.
I think one of them died

[Slip Shod]

Gorge Soros is the best boogie man of politics. The Koch brothers need 2 to reach his level of fright.

I know, right? There's basically little difference in what he does and what the Koch brothers do. It's just that he's on the other team. This infuriates those with a certain kind of mind. "How DARE they use our own tactics against us?!"

George Soros' money got this bum in office I believe you're going to see it a lot of pushback against these lunatic DA's financed by Soros in the months to come.

Los Angeles County jury awards $1.5M to prosecutor suing DA George Gascon for retaliation
Los Angeles County DA George Gascon faces at least a dozen lawsuits from his own prosecutors claiming they were retaliated against for speaking out against his policies
Louis Casiano By Louis Casiano , Michael Ruiz | Fox News

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

I know, right? There's basically little difference in what he does and what the Koch brothers do. It's just that he's on the other team. This infuriates those with a certain kind of mind. "How DARE they use our own tactics against us?!"

People love money in politics. As long as the money is going to their politics.

[Tarmaque]

People love money in politics. As long as the money is going to their politics.

Remember when our politicians were supposed to take the "Pauper's Oath"?

...neither do I.

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

Remember when our politicians were supposed to take the "Pauper's Oath"?

...neither do I.

There was a time that those positions were mostly voluntary. I don't think that would be a workable solution today, but there is something about money that has a corrupting effect. Perhaps it's the relation to power.

[GuideToACrazyWorld]

This was one of the fairest assessments of the economic history of my state. It was very interesting.

It's easy to point at where we are known and claim that it's a damning argument against the left, but I don't really see it that. It's true that it's the leadership of the left that has almost exclusively brought us here, but I don't think that it's a problem that is inherent to the left. I think what is happening here is what happens when a single party goes completely unchecked period. In a healthy democracy a party has to always fight for their ideas. Only the best ideas rise to the top. (stop laughing I said healthy democracy). Even good ideas often can't make it through the opposition. The parties' worst ideas have no chance. But in a one-party system there is a disturbing arrogancy. Every idea seems good in an echo chamber. Once all the good ideas are used up the party moves on to the bad ones, and eventually the absolutely idiotic ones.

We often hear people who are one party voters. People who honestly believed if one party just controlled it all we'd be better off. Before you look at California as an example to promote such thinking for the GOP, you might want to look at the abject poverty in the bible belt. The irony to me is that right leaning failure seems to bring about a much more equitation society then a left leaning failure. Of course, it's, as the old knock-on communism goes, it's the equal sharing of misery.

Something that this video doesn't point out about the income disparity in this state is that large portions of it are as poor or poorer than those bible belts. Take I-5 south sometime. Once you get past the greater Sacramento area until you cross the "grapevine" you will see poverty that will make you think you are somewhere else. In Merced County for instance there are billboards bragging about the number of citizens covered ny Medicare, they are normally upwards of 90%. The over whelming majority of wealth in Ca is in 3 major metropolitan areas. The Bay Area (which some will now divide between San Francisco and Silicon Vally, more debated Oakland), Sand Diego, and LA. There are some other pockets of wealth along the central cost, and a rather middle class feel in Sacramento, but outside of that there are a lot of people barely making it. As much of a mess as the GOP is, think about that before you want them to go away entierly.