DALLAS — In a rare exclusive, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson told us her office is close to replacing a national voter information-sharing program that Texas dumped last year.
While Nelson said it could happen over the next couple of months, it won’t be in time for the Nov. 5 election.
The national program Texas left behind is called ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center.
It is designed to catch repeat voters and keep voter rolls accurate by providing officials with reports that identify inaccurate or out-of-date voter registration records, deceased voters, individuals who appear to be eligible to vote but are not yet registered, and possible cases of illegal voting.
But Texas, along with eight other Republican-led states, abandoned the program in 2023.
“We’re very close to having a replacement. We are doing everything that ERIC did. We’re just doing it in many different ways. And we’d like to have it all put together in a central and a formalized process that we go through,” Nelson said on Inside Texas Politics.
There is actually a law in Texas that requires the state to participate in an information-sharing program such as ERIC.
Since there’s no replacement in place, the state could, technically, be breaking its own law.
But when we asked the Secretary of State that question, she said no, without explaining further.
Nelson said Texas decided to leave ERIC because the information we were receiving was less accurate after the other states pulled out. And she says it would have become quite expensive for Texas to remain with fewer states involved.
She told us the state’s new system will have in place many of the same weapons used by ERIC, including memorandums of understanding with other states to share information. But she didn’t reveal how many states will initially be part of the program.
The new system will also confirm if voters have died.
And Nelson said they continue to try to get citizenship verification from the federal government, even recently resorting to a lawsuit in an attempt to get that information.
Despite not being in place yet, or having ERIC, the Secretary of State says Texas voters have nothing to worry about.
“This upcoming election will be the most secure election Texas has ever had,” she promised.