The Electronic Registration Information Center in Washington, D.C., was created in 2012 by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law via a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust. ERIC shares multi-state voter registration information to improve both the accuracy of voter rolls and the encouragement of greater voter participation in elections. A Brennan Center study discovered an increasing rate of eligible voters being removed from the rolls.
Structure
In 2012, seven states, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, joined to form ERIC, a non-profit organization. As of December 2019, 29 states plus the District of Columbia comprised its membership. Each jurisdiction has a member's seat on the organization's board. By 2019, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin had joined the partnership. The District of Columbia is also a member. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, its budget was slightly less than one million dollars.
Operations
ERIC essentially took the place of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, or "CrossCheck." That was an extremely labor-intensive and largely ineffective enterprise that had been developed in the interests of protecting the integrity of elections by focusing on and identifying voters who cast ballots in more than one state in the same electoral period. After years of major erroneous purges of voter rolls, harmful misidentification of legitimate voters, and costly operation in return for very marginal success, it was shut down in December 2019 in part off its own weight, but also as a direct result of litigation successfully brought by the Kansas Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. ERIC, on the other hand, was developed by minimalist data scientist Jeff Jonas, using his effective software in a multistate project to identify eligible voters who had fallen off the rolls via unreported changes of address, for instance, and thereby to increase voter participation and also to resolve errors in voter rolls, such as removing names of deceased voters.. Bringing a different perspective to the difficulties, Jonas reported finding, "As I dove into the subject, it grew on me, the complexity and relevance of the problem." Between 2012 and 2018, ERIC identified 26 million persons who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote, as well as 10 million registered voters who had moved, or who appeared on more than one list. As with many aspects of the electoral process, the maintenance and integrity of voter rolls are prominent issues. ERIC's role in the process is determinedly neutral. Administrators from both Democratic and Republican majority states have participated in the process of refining the product and reduced the challenge of handling data processing. Jonas modified his existing technology to accommodate the new challenges to identity resolution. "Every time you get two pieces of junk mail from the same place, that’s an entity resolution problem," according to Jonas. He says they may be difficult to discern, but they're ubiquitous. In 2017, researchers at Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Microsoft Corporation confirmed that Crosscheck produced erroneous eligibility data, elevating the potential of disenfranchising legitimate voters. An investigation by ProPublica found that Crosscheck was also lacking sufficient protection to keep registrant information from being hacked. States joining the program have agreed with pursuing its non-partisan and protective goals. David Becker, former head of the elections program at Pew and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research observed, "If we didn't do that, ERIC would become another politicized tool." That year, member governments included twenty-four states and the District of Columbia, from both traditionally "red," and "blue" jurisdictions. Each group contributes at least voter registration and motor vehicle license data. ERIC's software digests and links that data, combining it with other input such as postal change-of-address lists. Private personal information including date of birth, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers, are stringently encrypted to ensure privacy. The program locates those eligible to vote no matter what their domiciles. Participating states are required to mail notifications to people identified as eligible to vote but not registered. Follow-up research in some states concluded that 10 to 20 percent of those contacted had later registered to vote, a high response rate for direct mailings, Mr. Hamlin said. That rate suggests 2.6 million to 5.2 million of the 26 million people notified became voters. Some state administrators said determining a person's current domicile can present problems, per the Brennan Center study. Member states report that "false positives" are rare. Unopened returned mail — evidence of a wrong address — is substantially reduced. Colorado's outreach produced the highest percentage of eligible, registered voters in the country in 2016, at 90 percent, up from 82 percent in 2012. "For my money, ERIC is a big part of that," said Judd Choate, Colorado’s director of elections. "ERIC has been a game-changer in elections for those of us in it." Jonas has been particularly pleased that ERIC has a two-person staff with one tending the constantly growing database of more than 275 million records. He says, "It’s not beholden to an army of experts."
