Today’s entry: Brian, your voter fraud story reminded me of something I haven’t heard discussed in a long time. I remember Florida was supposed to join some network or something that was supposed to block people from voting in multiple states. Did that end up happening?
Bottom Line: What I believe you’re referencing is ERIC or the Electronic Registration Information Center. Here’s a quick refresher on what it is, ERIC is a Washington D.C. based non-profit formed with the backing of the Pew Charitable Trust, an offshoot of the Pew Research Center. Every participating state has a designated board member tasked with oversight. The collaborative shares voter registration information across the database to clean up voter rolls which might have duplicate and/or deceased voters. Pew felt it was a necessary initiative after their research turned up nearly 2 million deceased voters still listed as active voters across the country and 2.75 million people registered to vote in multiple states in the 2012 election cycle.
Last year Governor DeSantis announced Florida would join ERIC after the program's review of the 2018 election cycle revealed, with just 19 states and D.C. participating at the time, over 2.6 million voter records were incorrect. That included 2.3 million people who had moved, more than 177,000 voters registered in multiple states, and over 37,000 deceased voters. On December 12th, Florida became the 29th state to join ERIC. As of today, 30 states are members. Having over half the country now onboard is an encouraging trend. Unfortunately, as it pertains to the 2020 election cycle there’s a but for Florida. The state had such a late start entering this cycle with ERIC, exacerbated by the pandemic, that the Florida Division of Elections was still attempting to meet the requirements of ERIC as recently as two weeks ago, this included mailing out voter registration information to Floridians who’ve requested public record exemptions in Florida. At that point votes by mail had already been cast. It remains unclear what effect ERIC will have on ensuring accurate voter rolls for November 3rd's elections.
It should be noted that a smattering of news organizations attempted to conflate the state’s efforts to comply with ERIC requirements with the crashing of the state’s voter registration website. One is unrelated to the other. Something is better than nothing and Florida should be good to go for future cycles but its clear full use of the ERIC system won’t have been achieved for this year’s elections.
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