Missouri ditched a voter roll system. It may cause delays, longer lines on Election Day.

ST. LOUIS �� Eric Fey is bracing for Election Day snarls because of a decision his state made last year.

Missouri pulled out of a collaboration known as the , or ERIC, which helps states keep voter rolls accurate �� such as flagging when people move. Fey, the Democratic director of elections in 51붚죕 County, expects delays when people discover at the polls that the address on their voter registration record is incorrect.

�쏮ore people will be doing change-of-address forms at polling places and at the election office on Election Day,�� said Fey, who is also president of a statewide local election authorities group. �쏛t least for those voters, it takes longer, and there is a longer line.��

Missouri and eight other states �� Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia �� left ERIC in the last two years.

The move, driven by Republican leaders, followed on the heels of a baseless article published by a 51붚죕-based website, Gateway Pundit, which alleged ERIC is a left-wing plot funded by billionaire George Soros. In fact, ERIC is funded by its member states �� now 24 of them, plus Washington, D.C. �� and helps them kick ineligible voters off the rolls as well as register new ones.

It received startup funding years ago from The Pew Charitable Trusts, which has over its history partnered with Soros�� Open Society Foundations along with other funders, including conservative ones.

In Missouri, local election officials weren�셳 consulted on the decision to leave the collaboration. That�셲 according to a highly critical January report from the state�셲 Republican auditor, who said there were no plans �쐔o fully replace the benefits received from the membership.��

States that left ERIC have tried to find or create another system that does the same data-matching and cleaning �� and failed. When states leave ERIC without an effective replacement, it can make their voter databases less accurate. That in turn can feed bad-faith arguments about election fraud, experts worry.

Another underappreciated consequence is the one worrying Fey: People in those states who haven�셳 updated their voter registration after moving will likely find it more challenging to cast a ballot.

Census data shows the problem disproportionately affects people of color, low-income Americans and younger people because they move more frequently. Voters in those groups are more likely to register as Democrats.

�쏮obility is the biggest challenge election officials face in terms of keeping accurate voter lists. Routine, quality list maintenance is especially important with highly mobile populations,�� said Shane Hamlin, executive director of ERIC, in an email to the Center for Public Integrity.

It also means more challenges for local election offices. In 51붚죕 County, it�셲 up to Fey, his Republican counterpart Rick Stream and their staff to update the records, which eventually go into Missouri�셲 statewide voter registration database. The office used to have help with this massive task through ERIC.

�쏮any people in the 21st century feel like, �쁈 updated my address with pick-your-other-government-agency, but it doesn�셳 get to the election office. I thought I did all this stuff. Why don�셳 you have my information updated?�쇺�� Fey noted.

Stream also saw ERIC as a beneficial tool. He thinks it is unfortunate the state left the effort.

�쏧t gave us information that we couldn�셳 have received any other way,�� Stream said. �쏣RIC was good in that it crossed state lines.��

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who was in his first year in that office when the state joined ERIC, made the decision to pull out. He said in an interview that he doesn�셳 remember if he consulted with local election authorities about the decision.

�쏧t�셲 not something you would normally consult them on,�� said Ashcroft, who said he instead talked to other secretaries of state and his office�셲 information technology staff. �쏧t�셲 not their work. I am responsible for the statewide voter registration system.��

But local election authorities are responsible for keeping voter rolls up to date in their jurisdictions. It�셲 that data that feeds into the statewide system.

Ashcroft confirmed that local election authorities are the only ones who add or remove voters from the rolls in Missouri.

�쏻hen there are well-defined, credible opportunities to promote voting, he is going in the opposite direction,�� said Nimrod �쏳od�� Chapel, a lawyer and president of the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP, who is concerned about the ERIC departure. �쏧t�셲 going to hurt all Missourians, but without a doubt Black and brown Missourians who are moving at greater rates, whether to find jobs or communities that they can live in.��

Mobile voters pose a challenge

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires states to implement electronic voter registration databases, but it does not require them to format the data in a way that allows for comparisons. That complicates efforts to determine if a voter has left one state for another. The federal government also doesn�셳 provide all the information states need to keep their voter rolls up to date.

ERIC was built to address these problems. In Minnesota, for example, election-day voter registration dropped after the state joined ERIC in 2014. These same-day registrations accounted for more than 10% of total votes in the two elections before that year; they fell to less than 6% by 2022.

When states leave ERIC, it affects the states that remain, said David Maeda, the Minnesota elections director and secretary of ERIC. For every state that leaves, that�셲 one less to check with for Minnesotans who moved.

�쏧t�셲 been a really difficult year for all of us in it,�� Maeda said. �쏻e�셱e getting less data �� including the very large Florida and Texas.��

Voters whose information is out-of-date in their state�셲 voter registration database may end up traveling to multiple locations on Election Day just to cast a ballot. They can�셳 request a mail-in ballot. They won�셳 receive election-related mail. Canvassing candidates or issue-focused petitioners will not be able to seek them out to talk about policy ahead of the election.

The impact for voters won�셳 be clear until they attempt to vote. There�셲 no way to know yet how much change-of-address work is backing up in local election offices that no longer have access to ERIC.

David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, helped launch ERIC while director of the Pew elections program. He expects longer lines and more provisional ballots, offered to people when certain registration issues crop up. Such ballots take longer for voters to fill out and have a higher chance of not being counted.

Keeping voter registration databases up-to-date is never-ending work. A Pew report from 2012, the year ERIC launched, estimated that one out of every eight voter registration records in the U.S. is inaccurate.

That need to conduct regular �쐋ist maintenance�� is regulated by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as the motor voter law.

The law requires states to appoint a chief to official to oversee elections. The official is also charged with making sure the state makes a �쐒easonable effort�� to identify voters who have entered the prison system, moved, died or become otherwise unable to vote.

One stark example that crossed the line: Leading up to the 2000 presidential election, election officials in the city of 51붚죕 moved more than 30,000 voters to �쐇nactive�� lists, alarming Black leaders. On Election Day, hundreds of people couldn�셳 vote. Poll workers calling headquarters to verify eligibility couldn�셳 get through on jammed lines.

Voters sent to the election board�셲 main office in downtown 51붚죕 to plead their case were still standing in line at 10 p.m., trying to vote.

In the aftermath, a federal consent decree required 51붚죕 Board of Election commissioners to change their policies for maintaining accurate registration records and properly notify voters of their registration status.

�쁇orrible and misleading�� information

The Gateway Pundit, which grew in popularity after promoting lies about the 2020 election and is now the subject of two defamation lawsuits, began publishing its ERIC pieces on Jan. 20, 2022. Within a week, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin ended the state�셲 membership. Ardoin told Votebeat the decision had nothing to do with the Gateway Pundit. Alabama followed nearly a year later.

In March 2023, Trump used his Truth Social platform to encourage states to end their membership, saying without evidence that it �쐏umps the rolls�� for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.

The same day, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia officials all released statements that they were leaving ERIC �� Missouri�셲 secretary of state said he was leading them in doing so.

Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Texas withdrew over the next several months.

The watchdog group American Oversight obtained emails from Ashcroft�셲 office that show one of his top lieutenants expressing concern before the state pulled out from ERIC about the �쐆orrible and misleading�� information circulating about the organization.

For states that left ERIC, trying to recreate what officials there spent years and millions of dollars developing has not gone well.

�쏺irginia paid $29,000 in September to regain access to just a sliver of the data they used to obtain via the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC,�� Votebeat reported in December. �쏛labama and Missouri officials took months to come up with new plans for cleaning voter rolls, landing on plans that are less rigorous than ERIC.��

Public Integrity requested any documents from the Missouri Secretary of State�셲 office detailing current voter list maintenance efforts. The agency said some information could not be released publicly but provided a memo sent to local election officials. That memo, said 51붚죕 County�셲 Fey, had no additional guidance or assistance beyond what the state offered while an ERIC member �� but without the tools ERIC provided.

Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, said he is �쐋ooking at other ways to get and massage the data.�� But he said the local offices still receive change-of-address and death reports as they did both before and during the state�셲 ERIC membership. He said he thought the reports are �쐇ndistinguishable�� from ERIC�셲.

�쏧 don�셳 think there is a vacuum left by ERIC,�� he said.

Brianna Lennon, the county clerk in Boone County, disagrees that the information local officials receive now is equally good.

�쏷he reports look the same, but the background data is not the same because there�셲 no information to show where people died out of state,�� said Lennon, previously the state�셲 deputy director of elections.

Boone County, home to the University of Missouri-Columbia, benefited from ERIC in a number of ways, she said.

�쏝ecause we are a college town, people do change addresses quite a bit,�� Lennon said.

One tool pitched to election officials as an ERIC alternative is EagleAI. It�셲 supported by Cleta Mitchell, who aided former President Donald Trump�셲 efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and, Rolling Stone magazine reported, pressed state officials to leave ERIC.

States that did so �쐍o longer have the burden�� of offering voter registration to the lion�셲 share of citizens who are eligible but haven�셳 registered, Mitchell said in an emailed response to Public Integrity. She also claimed that those states are doing as well as or better with list maintenance as before.

EagleAI performs matches with public data such as property records. That type of matching, election experts warn, produces too many false positives to be used as a reliable method for cleaning voter registration databases.

Concerns about sharing data

Shortly after the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, Kansas officials signed agreements with Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri and began sharing data for list maintenance through a program known as Interstate CrossCheck.

In 2019, it was shut down. A federal audit found security vulnerabilities, and voters sued after portions of their Social Security numbers were exposed.

Now, some former ERIC states �� such as Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and Florida �� are creating data-sharing agreements that strike David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-51붚죕, as a worrisome echo of that history.

�쏶tates doing these new agreements are basically doing the same thing as what Kansas CrossCheck was, and we already know it was no good,�� Kimball said. �쏧 don�셳 know what they expect, other than to sow distrust in voting systems.��

Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, didn�셳 like a commitment members have to make when they join ERIC: attempt to reach out to 95% of eligible but unregistered voters in the state to provide them information about how to register.

In his 2023 letter about ending the state�셲 membership, he said ERIC �쐄ocuses�� on adding names to voter rolls by requiring states to contact individuals who �쏿lready had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision to not be registered.��

In fact, the ERIC bylaws attempt to make sure its members aren�셳 bothering people.

�쏮embers shall not be required to initiate contact with eligible or possibly eligible voters more than once at the same address,�� the bylaws note, �쐍or shall members be required to contact any individual who has affirmatively confirmed their desire not to be contacted for purposes of voter registration.��

Asked why he doesn�셳 want to do that outreach, Ashcroft said Missourians don�셳 need it.

�쏣verybody has a chance to [register to] vote all the time,�� he said. �쏷hey can do it on their cellphones or smartphones, they can do it on their computer. That�셲 a disingenuous question.��

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