For two years, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), has come under scrutiny for its controversial tactics. The national non-profit organization purports to be the foremost voter roll-cleaning tool; however, ERIC largely serves as a state-funded voter recruitment effort.
ERIC’s Origins:
ERIC was founded after the ACLU successfully sued Crosscheck, an interstate voter registration system designed to identify voters with registrations in multiple states. The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002 in the wake of the Bush-Gore 2000 election, requires states to regularly check voter registration rolls for duplicates and outdated registrations. ERIC claims to fill this role and was founded by David Becker, a well-known leftwing activist who served as an attorney in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. In 2005 Beck, as a lawyer with the DOJ, contacted the City of Boston offering to undermine a DOJ lawsuit against Boston.1 Becker's boss and head of the Civil Rights Division Brad Schlozman said Becker’s conduct “was the most unethical thing I’ve ever seen [and] [c]lassic of someone who should have been disbarred.” “He’s a hard-core leftist [who] couldn’t stand conservatives,” Schlozman continued2 (Kennedy, 2020).
In 2005 Becker became the director of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that since 2004 has received more than $2.6 million from the Open Society Institute funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.3
In 2009, Pew hired Becker as a projects director in the Election Initiatives program. He was tasked with solving two problems : (1) registering eligible but unregistered persons to vote, and (2) maintaining clean voter rolls. He helped create ERIC by 2012; the program originally had seven member states. ERIC functions through state membership. Member states join by paying dues, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. Member states then sit on the board of ERIC.
More recently, Becker gained notoriety during the 2020 presidential election for starting another organization called The Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR). CEIR accepted $69.5M Zuckerbucks leading up to the 2020 election, using the resources to help election administration staff recruit and turn out low-propensity voters in Democrat strongholds.
Amistad Project and American Voter Alliance investigations have revealed that CEIR joined with numerous leftist nonprofits to convert urban core government election offices into partisan democrat voter turnout centers causing a dramatic disparate treatment of voters within a state in the 2020 election. Becker has apparently extended this practice to ERIC.
Questionable Practices:
Past ERIC contracts appear to indicate that ERIC’s primary purpose may be voter recruitment rather than keeping the voter rolls clean, in that, participating in the ERIC program was paired with the compulsory requirement to contact and attempt to register eligible but unregistered persons. And yet no such compulsory requirement existed for voter roll cleanup.
Further concerns were raised after the 2020 election. At the time, ERIC’s membership consisted of some thirty states. At first, a few red states expressed concerns over ERIC's origin, funding, and priorities. This concern further grew over ERIC’s contracts which require states to accept their methods, and moreover supersedes citizen requests through the Freedom of Information Act, effectively removing transparency from the voter roll management process. By March of 2023, an avalanche of state withdrawals had begun. Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, Alabama, Ohio, and Iowa had all expressed a desire or intent to withdraw from the group. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose in withdrawing his state’s membership in ERIC stated: “I cannot justify the use of Ohio’s tax dollars for an organization that seems intent on rejecting meaningful accountability…and [which] wag[es] a relentless campaign of misinformation…”.4
While ERIC does provide valuable reports to state agencies that can be utilized for the purpose of voter roll cleanup, many have still found the requirement to spend taxpayer dollars to actively recruit and register new voters a major sticking point. Most recently, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and his top election official, Susan Beals, issued a letter withdrawing from ERIC in which they reference yet another concern - ERIC allegedly sharing private voter information with political organizations, namely Becker’s nonprofit The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) that targeted leftwing voter turnout with Zuckerberg funds.
ERIC appears to be a part of the left’s shadow government operating many government election offices to partisan advantage. Such conduct should not be tolerated as managing elections is a core government function that must be conducted in a nonpartisan, transparent, accountable, and inclusive manner. Government election offices must not place their thumb on the scale in the manner in which they manage elections and direct voter turnout efforts.
Kennedy, W.J. “Mark Zuckerberg Beneficiaries Promoting Fair Elections Not Exactly Non-Partisan as Advertised (Sep. 20, 2020. Mark Zuckerberg beneficiaries promoting fair elections not exactly non-partisan as advertised | Legal Newsline.
Id
People for the American Way, Influence Watch. People for the American Way (PFAW) - InfluenceWatch - InfluenceWatch.
Montellaro, Zach. “2 more Republican states abruptly depart from interstate voter list program.” Politico, March 18, 2023. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/18/republican-states-depart-from-interstate-voter-list-program-00087728.
Hyperlink Citations:
https://www.influencewatch.org/person/david-becker/
https://theamericanleader.org/leader/david-becker-making-elections-more-secure/
https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/republican-outrage-over-zuckerbergs-2020-election-splurge/
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/11/1175662382/virginia-eric-withdrawal