Voter fraud

A 59-year-old man was arrested last week for allegedly double voting in the 2020 presidential election. Florida authorities brought the felony charge because of information submitted by Virginia to a national database called ERIC, which is short for the Electronic Registration Information Center. The very same day, Florida pulled out of the fraud detection consortium, along with Missouri and West Virginia, capitulating for political reasons to bizarre conspiracy theories peddled by those who still claim that former president Donald Trump won reelection in 2020.

If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC as the enormous success it has been in helping states clean up their voter rolls by identifying people who have died or moved, as well as those who have cast ballots in multiple states. But other red states might soon head for the exits, causing the system to collapse — and making ballot fraud harder to detect next year.

The nonprofit association, which is led by its own members, formed in 2012 after a report showed that one in eight voter registrations across the country were no longer valid. Four of the seven charter members were Republican-led states. By last year, 34 states plus D.C. had joined — including the six tightest presidential battlegrounds. The system compiles voter participation records from member states along with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service and death records from the Social Security Administration. The pooling of information has identified more than 11.5 million people who have moved across state lines and over 60 million potential voters who are unregistered.

After a decade of operating in near-obscurity, lies about ERIC began bubbling up from the fever swamps, such as that George Soros was behind the project and that the initiative is a left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls. The basis for this claim is that states agree when they join to send postcards every two years to people, whom the system identifies as eligible but unregistered to vote, with information on how they can sign up.