The far-right fuss over voter rolls isn’t about election integrity. It’s an effort to suppress.

A sign marks a polling site with multiple precincts at a fire station in New Orleans' Garden District on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2022. (Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)

If you’re to believe the far right, our voter rolls face constant peril from the threat of ill-willed hackers, nefarious foreign conspirators and evil villains that make James Bond’s various nemeses look like Teletubbies.

I could argue that Teletubbies are actually evil in their own way, but the point is that Republican leaders from Congress to Baton Rouge and other state capitals are selling a false narrative that cloaks voter suppression under the guise of election integrity.

Secretary of State Nancy Landry announced last week that Louisiana is the sixth state to join the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID), which allows elections officials to verify voter registration across state lines to ensure no one is signed up to vote in multiple jurisdictions.

“One of the most important roles I have as Louisiana’s Chief Election Officer is to ensure our voter rolls are accurate,” Landry said in a July 10 news release.

If AVID sounds like a familiar concept, that’s because it’s meant to replace an existing multi-state collaboration: the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). Secretary of State Wes Allen said as much when he pulled Alabama out of ERIC in 2023, claiming it’s a puppet of billionaire George Soros, known for funding liberal causes.

That’s not the case. ERIC was launched in 2012 as a third-party entity independent from government with financial support from its member states, both Republican- and Democrat-led.

ERIC obtains its data from official voter registration and motor vehicle agencies, the Social Security Administration and the National Change of Address Program of the U.S. Postal Service.

When he backed Alabama out of ERIC a day after he took office, Allen said he had “concerns over a private organization having access to the private data of Alabama citizens, including the driver’s license numbers, contact information and partial social security numbers of minors.”

It’s worth noting AVID also uses state and federal data sources to validate voter registrations, including U.S. Postal Service address change records and the Social Security death index, the Alabama Reflector reported . I guess we’re expected to believe Alabama, where Allen has attempted to keep President Joe Biden off this fall’s ballot , is just more trustworthy when it comes to our personal data.

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Allen also made it a point to note ERIC is based out a virtual office in — clutch pearls here — Washington, D.C. And to his apparent surprise when he tracked down the address, he found no one working out of the virtual office and that there were no servers on site.

Call me crazy, but maybe it’s a solid cybersecurity practice to keep servers with sensitive data off site. As for maintaining a virtual office, welcome to the 21st century, Secretary Allen.

Louisiana was an ERIC member until 2022 when Kyle Ardoin, Landry’s predecessor as secretary of state, decided to pull the state out of it. His reasons were never clear, though his spokesman at the time said Ardoin’s concerns were data-related — and not connected to conservative conspiracies that ERIC was a left-wing tactic to undermine elections.

Ardoin was first assistant secretary of state when Louisiana joined ERIC in 2014, and he didn’t seem to have any concerns about it back then. His commissioner of elections, Sherri Hadskey, was part of the ERIC board when Ardoin pulled out two years ago.

If ERIC had glossed over voter roll concerns or made glaring mistakes, it would validate conspiratorial claims that the system is flawed. But, as Votebeat reported in 2022, ERIC sent the following updates to Louisiana over its eight years in the network so its registration records could be made accurate:

• 16,330 deceased voters.
• 54,600 voters who moved to another state.
• 543,450 voters who moved within the state.
• 4,260 in-state duplicate voter registrations.

So all told, ERIC shared more than 600,000 updates with Louisiana to ensure its voter records would be as accurate as possible. Seems like a pretty worthwhile endeavor, which raises an important question: Why would it need to be duplicated?

“A group of states could come together, and, after several years and millions of dollars of investment, create something that is almost as good as ERIC,” co-founder David Becker told States Newsroom last year. “And you’d have to wonder, why would you do that?”

Allen has an answer. In part, he says, it’s because ERIC is geared more to determine who isn’t registered to vote than verifying existing registrations. He’s referring to ERIC’s requirement that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters to get them on the rolls.

And there you have what lies at the heart of far-right elections officials’ objections to ERIC: Let’s make sure the rolls are purged of anyone who doesn’t belong, but dadgummit if we’re going to encourage eligible folks to register.

Because it’s hard to make accusations of a stolen election if people are, you know, actually registered to vote.

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The post The far-right fuss over voter rolls isn’t about election integrity. It’s an effort to suppress. appeared first on Louisiana Illuminator .