Seven Republican-led states have so far left the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact for sharing voter registration data, and some plan to create their own data-sharing networks to replace ERIC. Photo by Courtney Pedroza with Getty Images.

By Zachary Roth
Indiana Capital Chronicle

So far this year, seven states, all Republican-led, have left the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact for sharing voter registration data, and more could follow.

Amid the exodus, some states, including Texas and Virginia, have said they plan to create their own data-sharing networks to replace ERIC.

Pledging to build a new system gives these states a way to rebut charges that leaving ERIC will make it harder for them to keep their voter rolls up to date. ERIC provides its members with what they say is invaluable and highly accurate data on voters who have moved or died.

But a close look at how ERIC was set up and how it operates suggests that building any new interstate partnership from scratch will be a major challenge, at the very least requiring significant time and resources.

More likely, it appears, is that the states quitting ERIC are simply leaving themselves without an effective system for sharing information, leading to less accurate and up-to-date voter rolls.

That will not only make it harder for election administrators to catch the rare cases of illegal voting. It also will hugely complicate their efforts to ensure smooth and well-run elections across the board — at a time when Americans’ trust in voting systems is already dangerously low.

Virginia Exits

On May 11, Virginia became the most recent state to leave ERIC, echoing the same false charges of political bias spread by right-wing activists that led the other states — Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Iowa, Missouri, and Alabama — to depart earlier this year (Louisiana left last year). Some of these states also balked at ERIC’s mandate that they reach out to eligible voters and encourage them to register.

First, experts say, any useful data-sharing system needs to include records from state motor vehicle departments, because that data includes identifiers that don’t typically appear on voter-registration records, including a person’s full birthdate, their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and more.

Without that level of detail, attempts to match records will produce an extremely high rate of false positives, because lots of people have the same first name, last name, and birthday. (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida was purged from the rolls in 2006 after election administrators wrongly concluded he had died, thanks to exactly this error.)

But, because of privacy concerns, states protect motor vehicles department data very closely. ERIC only was able to get access to it after establishing an extensive set of cybersecurity protocols that experts say would be difficult to replicate, including double one-way hashing — essentially, a code to disguise sensitive data in case of a hack — and secure, dedicated domestic servers.

ERIC’s system was developed by Jeff Jonas, one of the world’s leading data scientists, and a former IBM Fellow — a title the company calls its “pre-eminent technical distinction,” given to “the best and brightest of our best and brightest.”

With this in mind, ERIC’s founders consciously included rules to appeal to both sides.

For red states concerned about election integrity, ERIC provided data that could help officials pare their rolls of ineligible voters. And for blue states concerned about expanding access, ERIC offered something else: A way to identify a state’s pool of eligible but unregistered voters, and a requirement that the state contact these potential voters and urge them to register. (This was the requirement that played a role in the recent departures of several red states — suggesting that the balance that ERIC sought to strike may be hard to maintain in an era when some red-state officials openly disdain efforts to expand access.)

In addition, ERIC’s board and executive committee are always bipartisan, and its chair alternates each year between election directors from a red state and a blue state.

The bottom line: Replicating what ERIC built would be a major technical, scientific, administrative and political challenge, even for a state committed to making it work.

“It’s really hard to stand up (a new system) on your own,” said Becker. “Because, one, you probably can’t get the data you need, and two, you’re probably not going to be able to afford to take the time to build the governance structure and technology that you need to make use of that data.”

A Cautionary Tale

An example already exists of what’s likely to happen if organizers of an interstate data-sharing system are unable or unwilling to invest the time and care needed to make it work effectively.

In 2005, Kansas election officials, working with their counterparts in Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri, created the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, often called Crosscheck, to help identify voters who were registered in multiple states.

When Kris Kobach became Kansas secretary of state in 2011, he expanded the program, and by 2014 it had 29 members.

But Crosscheck’s approach was badly flawed. The program didn’t require motor vehicles department data, and it flagged voter registrations as potential duplicates if the first name, last name, and birthdate all matched, inevitably producing huge numbers of false positives. States then had to wade through reams of Crosscheck data to weed these out.

“Crosscheck data is prone to false positives since the initial matching is only conducted using first name, last name, and date of birth,” Virginia election administrators reported in 2015. “The need to greatly refine and analyze Crosscheck data has required significant (elections) staff resources.”

In some cases, states failed to identify false positives sent by Crosscheck, and removed large numbers of eligible voters from the rolls.

There were also reports that raised questions about Crosscheck’s handling of private voter data. A 2018 lawsuit filed by the ACLU charged that Crosscheck’s lax security measures had violated voters’ right to privacy. As part of a settlement the following year, the program was shuttered. It hasn’t been in operation since.

See full article here.