DALLAS — It was one of the state’s best weapons to fight against voter fraud.
But Texas, along with eight other Republican-led states, abandoned the national, data-sharing program called ERIC, or the Electronic Registration Information Center.
As Texans head to the polls for the primary, Republican leaders have yet to replace the program with anything.
“I think that Republicans have really shot themselves in the foot here. They want to talk to you about dead voters. They want to talk to you about duplicate registration. They want to talk to you about out-of-state voters. Like this is the system we use to get those people off their list,” Jessica Huseman explained to us on Y’all-itics.
Huseman is the Editorial Director of Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization that reports on elections across the country. Its reporters have covered ERIC, and the Republican pullback, extensively.
When we asked Jessica how accurate the voter rolls are currently in Texas, she bluntly told us “not very.”
Among its many responsibilities, ERIC keeps voter rolls clean by providing officials with reports that identify inaccurate or out-of-date voter registration records, deceased voters, individuals who appear to be eligible to vote but who are not yet registered, and possible cases of illegal voting.
And Huseman says the reality of the situation is that those states that left ERIC now receive less accurate data, if any data at all, and that means less accurate elections.
“Right now is when election administrators are trying to figure out where polling locations are, trying to figure out how many polling locations they need, trying to figure how many ballots to print. Like this is an incredible logistics process that costs thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars,” Huseman explained. “And so, if you've got 4,000 extra voters on the roll, right, like that is a resource problem. And that becomes a taxpayer problem.”
Huseman also tells us there’s a law in Texas that requires the state to participate in an information sharing program.
Since there’s no replacement in place for ERIC, the state could, technically, be breaking its own law.
And Huseman says, kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more states that leave ERIC, the less useful it becomes.
24 states and the District of Columbia are still members. But their data is now less accurate as well.
“So for example, most out-of-state voters that live in New York moved to Florida. But Florida is not participating in ERIC anymore. And so, New York's participation in ERIC becomes dramatically less useful. Texas isn't participating, and so, New Mexico's becomes significantly less useful. So does Arizona because that's where they're going,” she said.
All of this will now be left up to your local elections administrators without the benefit of sophisticated equipment and know-how.
And voters will be the ones who suffer, showing up at the wrong polling location, for example, or having a ballot rejected after being asked to cast a provisional ballot because they’re not on the rolls.
“Transporting and using government data effectively is a massive, massive job that takes an incredible amount of server space, that takes an incredible amount of technological understanding. ERIC was essentially providing that on behalf of the entire country,” Huseman said.
Jessie also explains the “two-part” problem facing Texas now that it has left ERIC, a “mess in, mess out” as she describes it. And you’ll want to learn why come election night, she’ll be keeping a close eye on the small central Texas county of Gillespie, home to Fredericksburg. Can they possibly hand count all of those paper ballots? Listen to the entire episode to learn more. And go vote. Cheers!