Opinion | Republicans Are No Longer Calling This Election Program a ‘Godsend’


Mr. Becker, who served as a nonvoting member of ERIC’s board until his term expired this year, flagged a deeper flaw in the departing states’ reasoning: They control ERIC, along with the other member states. All the states were fully aware of the terms and costs of the agreement when they joined. If they want to change the way ERIC functions, it’s entirely within their power to offer a proposal and hold a vote, as they have done many times.

There is, of course, a far simpler explanation for the Republican desertion of ERIC: politics. Many of the officials who have pulled their states out of ERIC are running for higher office, and that means appealing to the Republican base, which is still addled by the toxic fumes of Mr. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement. (Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer who was central to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss, has been a leading advocate of the ERIC exodus.) Under the persistent influence of the former president, most Republican voters have been conditioned to view all electoral outcomes that don’t go their way as de facto illegitimate.

Republicans who are not running for higher office, on the other hand, seem to have no trouble defending ERIC. “Making policy choices based on misinformation is the worst,” said Gabe Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, which joined ERIC in 2019 and is happy to stick with it. “We’re already under pressure, but our calculus is what’s best for the voters of Georgia, because that’s our job.”

The problem is that, as the only game in town, ERIC works best when more states join. States that have resigned no longer have a good way to analyze or share their voter data, and states that remain will receive less useful reports (and will pay more money) because the pool of participants is smaller. In short, everyone loses.

“The very actors who said they care about list maintenance the most are now abandoning the only tool they had available,” said Ms. Lang. “It seems like the goal is to create chaos — to lead to bloated rolls so they can point at them and say, ‘Look at the problem we have,’ even though it’s a problem entirely of their own making.”

That would seem to be a paradox, but it turns out it’s the whole point.



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