Last year, the Texas legislature voted to opt out of a bipartisan voter registration data tool that made it more difficult to commit voter fraud, now experts raise concerns about the implications of the decision.
“Texas actually took away a tool that was actually used to help eliminate the possibility of voter fraud,” Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project at University of Texas, told KVUE.
Texas decided to exit the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) after lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1070 last year. ERIC is a nonprofit that aims to improve the accuracy of voter rolls, increase access to voter registration, reduce election costs, and increase efficiencies in elections.
Texas followed other Republican-led states in leaving ERIC, after conspiracy theories that billionaire donor George Soros was behind it.
“In some ways, it sounds so stupid because it is,” Blank said. “Texas and a number of supposedly southern, mostly Republican-led, Senate-led states pulled out of this program because of conspiracy theorists’ concerns about the possibility that these programs were essentially associated with people they didn’t like. And now it’s harder to ferret out voters who are registered in multiple states despite these great efforts to improve voter integrity.”
With elections approaching, more people are concerned that Texas’ decision could harm the process.
“I’m not proud that the state of Texas has opted to leave a multi-state compact that provides a lot of data that we would need to help keep the rolls clean,” Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Bruce Elfant told KVUE.
Without ERIC, the state will check to make sure voters are not registered to vote in multiple states by identifying votes whose addresses have changed using data from the National Change of Address database. Other experts have warned that the systems opted by the Republican states after leaving ERIC are too similar to the ones they criticized.
“These states have decided that instead of using a wheel, they’re going to invent a spherical device that will allow them to easily transport and roll items from A to B,” Josh Daniels, a former Republican county clerk in Utah told NPR last year. “Political officials who made bad choices to exit ERIC now have to make up the difference by essentially reinventing ERIC but without the benefit of years of experience and a system that has improved over time.”
