How the far right tore apart one of the best tools to fight voter fraud

[Nevilledog]

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008/eric-investigation-voter-data-election-integrity

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ERIC has been around since 2013, but up until early last year, it operated under the radar. It was mentioned at election conferences and almost nowhere else.

"Honestly, nobody knew what ERIC was," said Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw voting in Pennsylvania from 2019 to 2021 as secretary of the commonwealth.

The organization is a nonprofit voting partnership — completely voluntary — that allows member states an efficient way to share data to keep their voter rolls more up-to-date. It lets local election officials know when their voters move, die or illegally vote in more than one state in the same election.

"The little secret is that maybe more than 10 years ago, if somebody voted in Ohio, in Florida, in Arizona and Texas, you would have never known," said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, in an interview with NPR earlier this year. "With ERIC, we can compare our voter rolls to those states."

But in January 2022, the tool drew the ire of one of the most prolific misinformation peddlers on the internet: a website called the Gateway Pundit.

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