The Grass Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side?: Texas Opts Out of ERIC But Has Yet to Replace It
October 31, 2024
By: Angelica Radomski
Back in March 2020, the Texas Secretary of State announced that Texas would be joining ERIC, The Electronic Registration Information Center. Keith Ingram, the Director of Elections, noted the decision as an “important next step” while the League of Women Voters of Texas applauded the decision to join. Yet, in 2023, only a few years after joining, Texas decided to leave ERIC.
The March 2020 announcement shared that Texas’s participation in ERIC would assist Texas officials in identifying eligible but unregistered voters and encouraging them to vote. Additionally, the program would help Texas identify ineligible voters.
ERIC is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the integrity of elections throughout the United States. States that have joined ERIC as members, have the ability to ensure that their voting registration lists are updated and accurate. ERIC provides its member states with tools and data to identify both eligible voters who are not registered to vote, as well as ineligible voters who are registered to vote. ERIC helps states identify duplicate voters and those who have changed their names, relocated, or passed away.
According to its website, ERIC has identified 41.1 million voter record updates and 62 million potential voters. Despite having 33 member states in 2022, there are currently only 24 member states in ERIC. Recently, Texas, following the lead of other Republican-led states, has officially withdrawn from ERIC.
The beginning of Texas’s exit from ERIC began when the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 1070. The bill responded to growing concerns that the cost of ERIC’s membership outweighed any benefits Texas was receiving. At the time, Texas was allocating $1.5 million a year for the program and about $115,000 of that money went towards ERIC’s membership dues. Since more and more states were leaving ERIC, membership dues were set to increase.
Additionally, critics of ERIC objected to the organization’s requirement that states identify and communicate with eligible but unregistered voters. Supporters of Texas’s decision to leave ERIC raised concerns about using taxpayer dollars for registration efforts rather than simply identifying ineligible voters. Many argued that these registration efforts disproportionately favored democratic candidates, fostering the perception that ERIC was politically motivated. Senate Bill 1070 aimed to address these issues by allowing Texas to create its own system or find a private option that costs less than $100,000.
On March 10, 2023, Texas Secretary Jane Nelson announced changes in the State’s Elections Division. A new position was created to develop and manage an interstate voter registration crosscheck program, a requirement of Section 18.063 of the Texas Election Code. Secretary Nelson announced that Keith Ingram, the then Director of the Elections Division, would serve in the position.
Texas officially withdrew from ERIC when Christina Adkins, the Texas Director of Elections, notified Shane Hamelin, the Executive Director for The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) of the State of Texas’s resignation from ERIC. Adkins sent a short and brief letter stating that Texas’s resignation would be effective within 91 days from July 20, 2023.
Despite Texas’s official exit from ERIC, the state has yet to find an effective replacement to combat voter fraud. There has been chatter that Texas is considering replacing ERIC with Eagle AI. Eagle AI creates lists of voters by using several sources including criminal records, tax property data, obituary data, and the National Change of Address database. Using these lists, Eagle AI identifies and flags potential ineligible voters. Private activists can then personally evaluate the information and choose to file voter challenges under Section 16.091 of the Texas Election Code.
In August of 2023, the Texas Secretary of State’s office told Houston Public Media that although the state has not yet decided whether it would be using Eagle AI, the program has not yet been ruled out. Since August of 2023, there has been ongoing silence about Texas’s decision to replace ERIC. Although there are certain safeguards Texas uses to ensure the integrity of its elections, it does not seem that the state has fully adopted a system to replace ERIC.