[ April 16, 2024 ]
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Democratic Operatives Control Voter Rolls In 31 States, Report Shows
By: Victoria Marshall, The Federalist, August 11, 2022:Left-wing operatives are working overtime to accomplish their partisan goals and drive Democratic voter turnout.
Story continues below advertisementA prominent voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia has politically compromised ties, according to a new report by independent research group Verity Vote.
The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls. Started in 2012 by far-left activist David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts, the program is ostensibly run by the member states themselves. But as public records show, Democratic operatives are working overtime under the cover of ERIC to accomplish their partisan goals and drive Democratic voter turnout.
David Becker, Far-Left ActivistBecker’s left-wing ties have long concerned Republican state officials participating in ERIC. Before he started ERIC, Becker worked as a lobbyist for People for the American Way, a George Soros-funded advocacy group best known for the Right Wing Watch project, a website that catalogs and attacks conservative politicians and movements.
Before that, though, he was a Justice Department attorney whom colleagues remember as a “hard-core leftist” who “couldn’t stand Conservatives.”
While at the DOJ, Becker became the subject of an ethics complaint after he contacted Boston and offered his help in defeating a lawsuit made against the city by his employer for voting infractions. According to Hans von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the time, Becker “was supposed to be nonpartisan, but his emails uncovered in the Boston investigation revealed nasty, disparaging remarks about Republicans. Very unethical and unprofessional.”
After his stint at the DOJ and People for the American Way, Becker became the director of election initiatives at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he organized the creation of ERIC in 2012. Though Becker officially left ERIC in 2016, public records show he has continued to play a strong role in the organization, coordinating with state officials on ERIC-related activities and even running ERIC meetings. Documentation of that role is provided in Verity’s report. This is in violation of ERIC’s bylaws as Becker is a “non-voting board member” of ERIC and should not have the power to direct projects.
While Becker is a shrewd activist, ERIC member secretaries of state describe him as charming and brilliant. Becker is known to host swanky, all-access-paid election integrity conferences for state election officials and their spouses. Even during the pandemic, Becker courted ERIC members with Zoom catch-up calls. “Shane Hamlin and I have discussed doing another virtual get-together with the folks in the states (we did a small one last Friday) to catch up and hang out. No particular agenda, not about ERIC, just a good way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend (what’s a weekend?). I hope many of you can make it,” a May 15, 2020, email to ERIC members said.
ERIC, CEIR, and ‘Zuck Bucks‘But now ERIC is undergoing scrutiny for its involvement with another Becker project, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). That group was one of two leftist groups used to funnel Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million that funded the private takeover of government election offices in 2020. This funding targeted the blue areas of swing states, allowing left-wing operatives to run Democrat “get out the vote” operations from inside the election apparatus.
ERIC shares voter roll data — including records of unregistered voters — it receives from the states with CEIR, according to public information requests detailed in the report. CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach. As part of their agreement with ERIC, states are not allowed to disclose any data they send to nor receive from ERIC, however, ERIC is not under the same constraints and is able to work with CEIR.
Participants also express concern that ERIC does more to inflate voter lists without scrutiny than to scrub those lists of people who have died, moved, or otherwise become ineligible to vote in a given jurisdiction. Per ERIC’s own statistics, in 2020, it identified 17 million new voters compared to identifying only about 3 million inaccurate voters on the rolls.
Some member states are beginning to worry the organization is being mismanaged. Earlier this year, Louisiana announced its withdrawal from ERIC due to “questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes.”
Even more troubling is that some of the information shared — including the email addresses and cell phone numbers of voters — is now being used for a “disinformation” voter contact drive, according to reports.
ERIC’S Failure to Clean Voter Rolls
How does ERIC work? According to its membership agreement, every 60 days states are required to send “all active and inactive voter files,” “all licensing or identification records contained in the motor vehicles database,” and any state agency records that perform “voter registration functions” to ERIC, which matches those against data from all other member states and Social Security death data. From there it creates voter maintenance lists — lists of voters who have moved, died, or have duplicate registrations — and lists of non-registered voters called “eligible but unregistered.” States are then required to contact every person on the latter list and tell them how to register.
There’s much more. Keep reading…
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