A guest post by Patrice Johnson

A HUGE win for the citizens of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia. The three states announced on March 6 that they were joining Alabama and Louisiana in terminating their states’ agreements with the three-employee, third-party ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center).

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, along with Florida and West Virginia, sent letters to ERIC’s Executive Director Shane Hamlin stating their departure from the Electronic Registration Information Center known as ERIC.

For several months Missouri has been leading other states in an effort to reform the ERIC system by addressing significant concerns and implementing changes in ERIC.

“We have worked hard over the last several years to implement procedures that will make Missouri elections better, voter rolls more accurate, and bring greater trust to the election process,” Ashcroft said. “Voter confidence is compromised when individuals vote in more than one state and nothing is done. It appears that ERIC will not make the necessary changes to address these concerns. Therefore, it is time to move on.”

Cord Byrd, Secretary of State for the Sunshine State, said, “I have an obligation to protect the personal information of Florida’s citizens, which the ERIC agreement requires us to share. Florida has tried to back reforms to increase protections, but these protections were refused. Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC.”

“Our ERIC-related investigation, administrative complaints, and educational efforts are having a real-world effect. Success!” said Erick Kaardal, special counsel to the Thomas More Society, the law firm that represents Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) and Michigan Fair Elections (MFE). “Of course, there is still more work to do,” Kaardal added. “We still have to win in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other states, but the red states removing themselves is a sign of progress.”

Since January of last year, PIME has sounded the alarm that the opaque and biased ERIC system has been taking voters’ personal identifying information from the state’s DMV data and sending it on to unnamed, third-party leftwing groups. These undisclosed, private groups then use that data—information they could not obtain otherwise—to target partisan voter registrations and unfairly affect election outcomes.

1. Attempts to influence our elections exposed
2. Alabama withdraws from ERIC
3. FOIA Denied: No info on ERIC and QVF from local clerk
4. Tools for discussing the need to exit ERIC with your legislator
5. Who’s watching the watchers? Opaque 3rd parties control our personal info & elections in 98% of US
6. PIME HAVA complaint for SOS Benson joining Mich. in 3rd Party ERIC
7. Zuckerbucks and ERIC: Biased refs call game in favor of one side
8. Momentum Grows as ERIC exposed
9. CALL TO ACTION. Alert Legislators: The Left’s Taxpayer-Funded Voter Registration Machine, ERIC
10. Wisconsin’s participation in ERIC violates federal law, attorney claims
11. New evidence: Politically compromised ERIC bloats Michigan’s voter rolls to crisis levels
12. CALL TO ACTION: Alert your legislators. Politically compromised ERIC inserts bias into voter rolls
13. CALL TO ACTION: ERIC slips non-citizens onto voter rolls through Mich. DMV

A working group of ERIC member states proposed necessary changes to the ERIC Membership Agreement. Increased protections for confidential voter information was one request.

“Today, Florida, West Virginia, and Missouri said NO. They saw the problems of the ERIC system and listened to citizen concerns. They took action,” said Kerri Toloczko, a senior fellow with the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Florida Fair Elections Coalition.

Also of import was the need to limit the power of ex-officio partisan members of the ERIC board. “These ex-officio partisan members,” the Florida media release stated, “are not representatives of specific states and have undue influence over the organization and its decisions.”

However, ERIC exhibited an unwillingness to address the significant threats to electoral integrity, so Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced they were terminating their agreements with ERIC and withdrawing from the system.

Fact is stranger than fiction: ERIC’s offices are non-existent.

After he won his election last November, Alabama’s new Secretary of State, Wes Allen, decided to remove Alabama from ERIC. Recently, while visiting Washington D.C. for a convention of Secretaries of State, he decided to drop by the offices of ERIC. Their listed address is 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Ste 600, Washington, DC 20036.

“Since I was in town,” Allen said, “I went to see the ERIC Headquarters. What I found was that there was no ERIC headquarters at that address. There were no employees. There were no servers. There was no ERIC presence of any kind. Instead. I found a virtual office that is rentable by the day. What it was missing was people, servers, and any sign of the ERIC team.”

WHERE’D IT GO?: ALABAMA SECRETARY OF STATE WES ALLEN VISITS ERIC HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON DC

Missouri Media Release can be found HERE.

Florida Media Release can be found HERE.

Patty McMurray of 100 Percent Fed Up asks: Will Michigan SOS Jocelyn Benson follow suit and discontinue the use of ERIC?