Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: How the far right is making voter fraud easier

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

For nearly a decade, the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, quietly helped to clean up voter databases and catch fraud. It was a rare bipartisan success story, with Democrats praising it and Republicans calling it a "godsend."But recently, it has become the target of a Trump-allied lawyer and the far right. NPR Voting Correspondent Miles Parks and NPR's Investigations Team trace how conspiracy theories, secret meetings, and grassroots pressure are dismantling this obscure elections tool and giving election deniers their biggest policy victory yet.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

When far-right candidates lost in swing states in last year's midterms, it seemed clear that voters weren't buying the stolen election narrative that many of these candidates had pushed. But in many parts of the country, that false notion is still flourishing, in large part because of a woman named Cleta Mitchell. Thank you, Cleta Mitchell. Thank you for that explanation. Really interesting. And kind of appalling. Thank you, Tucker. Cleta Mitchell is somebody with great courage.

If you don't remember Mitchell, she's an election attorney who was a central player in former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election. She was on that infamous phone call when Trump pressured Georgia election officials about the state's results. But the people of Georgia and the people of America have a right to know the answers. Mitchell hosts a podcast about voting.

Hello. Welcome to this episode of Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell. Now Mitchell's influence is growing, and the fringe conspiracies on her show are pushing Republicans to abandon one of the best tools out there to fight voter fraud. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is the Sunday story from Up First. NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks, along with our investigations team, has been tracing a year-long pressure campaign to sabotage a bipartisan voting success story. Here's Miles. On our podcast, Who's Counting?, Cleta Mitchell is talking about the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC. ERIC is a very insidious organization. This is weird.

Only nerds who write about elections like me and nerds who run elections think about ERIC. Kathy Buchvar used to oversee voting in Pennsylvania as the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Was this the thing that was kind of in the conversation at all when you were Secretary of State? Eric specifically? Yeah. No. Honestly, nobody knew what Eric was. Eric is a voluntary partnership. It allows states to share information about their voters. It enables the people who run elections to know when their voters move or die. It's also the only way states have to flag if someone votes in more than one state, which is illegal. If that sounds pretty good to you, you're not alone. Here's a bunch of Republicans and Democrats telling me that.

I've been a big booster and supporter of it. The ERIC program is, for us, been a godsend. We think that gives voters confidence because they know our voter rolls are accurate. It helps us improve the accuracy of our voting list and ensure that everyone's registered to vote. For a while, everyone loved it. Well, almost everyone. Cleta Mitchell has spent the past year working to dismantle Eric. We need people to tell their legislatures and tell their state election offices

to stop sending the data, to just withdraw from Eric. Now, election deniers have been trying to change every part of how America votes. They want to get rid of voting by mail, voting early. They want to move back to hand-counting ballots, even though it's less accurate. But the reason the attack on Eric matters even more is because it's working. Iowa Secretary of State is recommending

the state leave an organization it once praised. Our new developments this week, after the state of Florida canceled a program that actually keeps track of voter rolls. That's right. Florida and two other states are pulling out of what's called the Electronic Registration Information Center. After a decade of uneventful collaboration, Eric is teetering on the brink of collapse. At its height, Eric had 32 members. Now eight states and counting have pulled out.

All Republican. Our investigation shows a conspiracy theory that started on a far-right website is now driving the political party bent on catching voter fraud to destroy one of the only tools states have to catch it. It really helps to know a little bit more about how this weird Eric thing works. There's nothing else like it. So let's go back to 2013. A man in a well-fitted suit and a purple tie is on stage at a tech conference. So I'm David Becker with the Pew Charitable Trust.

I'm here to talk to you all about... He's talking about the need to simplify voting. Someone in Washington who works in government came up to me and he said, I've got this great idea. Why don't we make elections more like Jiffy Lube? I thought, OK, go on. Becker has worked in voting for decades. Fifteen years ago, while he was with Pew, he got a bunch of voting people together and just asked them, what can we do to make elections better? Every single election official we asked back in 2008 said voter registration.

The federal government had begun requiring states to keep statewide voter lists, but it felt impossible to keep them up to date. Our society is highly mobile. About one-third of all Americans move within any given four-year period. And millions of people die every year, too. All that makes planning where people should vote or how to get information to them really hard, because the addresses voting officials have on file are often wrong. For voters, that can mean longer lines and even mail ballots getting sent to the wrong places. Eric solved two problems for

election officials. First, it pulls data from a bunch of different sources, as this infomercial explains. Like those from the DMV, the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, and other lists. Secondly, and more importantly, ERIC sifts through that data and spits out reports that election officials can use to keep their voting rolls up to date. Becker worked with a data scientist named Jeff Jonas to create the technology. He is the guy behind the software that detected the MIT blackjack cheats in casinos, if you remember that story. At one of their first meetings, Becker remembers Jonas putting up a rough sketch of the technology on a screen.

It was quiet in the room for about 10 to 15 seconds, and then you could hear a gasp. And that gasp was one of the election officials, because she realized this could actually work and solve a problem they'd been dealing with since voter registration first began. Other similar programs were riddled with so many false positives on people with the same names that election officials couldn't confidently use their data. But ERIC was different. It allowed states to tell with almost certainty which voters were which. Whether John Doe in one state and John Doe in another state are the same John Doe. And they can tell the state with the older record that John Doe has moved away and the state with the new record that you've got a new voter and you should reach out to them, make sure they know they can get registered to vote. The system helped update

voter rolls, which attracted Republicans who have long prioritized cleaning up America's voting lists. But it also required states to reach out to eligible voters who weren't registered yet, which appealed to Democrats. When New Jersey joined last year, Secretary of State Tahisha Way said she talked about Eric with people from both parties. You know, I had various conversations with my fellow secretaries who gave positive and I want to say bipartisan feedback at the time. To join, states often have to pass new laws and get their state DMV on board, which can be a long process. But slowly, more and more states have done it, which has meant more data being shared. In 2013, Eric identified 92,000 voters that had moved to different states.

In 2021, that number was almost 3.5 million. And states also use it to prosecute the small amount of fraud that does happen every federal election. You know, the good news is that kind of crime is rare, but we take it seriously. This is Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. He's a really interesting character in this story. He touted his endorsement by Trump last year. But he's also made a point to say the 2020 election wasn't stolen. I talked with him about Eric for a while in February.

I mean, the little secret is that maybe more than 10 years ago, if somebody voted in Ohio and Florida and Arizona and Texas, you would have never known. There was no way to catch that unless they went out and bragged about it. And so with Eric, we can compare our voter rolls to those states. So Eric was considered a success and growing until January of last year. Now Our Change will honour 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change,

this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. All right, we are back. I'm Myles Parks, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. The first crack in Eric surfaced with a press release in Louisiana. On January 27, 2022, the Republican Secretary of State, Kyle Ardwin, announced that Louisiana was putting its membership in ERIC on pause, citing concerns raised by, quote, citizens, government watchdog organizations, and media reports, which I can remember at the time striking me as really strange. I've covered voting for six years now, and I'm not exaggerating when I say no one,

no election official appointed or elected, Republican or Democrat, had ever criticized Eric when talking to me. I was really surprised. This is Maggie Toulouse-Oliver. She's the secretary of state in New Mexico. She's a Democrat who's worked really closely with Ardoin over the past few years. We're good friends and tried to have many conversations with him about it, you know, with the interest of keeping Eric intact, keeping as many states in as possible.

You know, if any of my voters move to or from Louisiana, I would like to know about it, right? She said she's still unsure exactly why he left Eric. Ardoin declined to be interviewed. But understanding why he made his decision helps to make sense of this whole Eric story. Remember his reference to media reports? Well, roughly a week before Louisiana's announcement, a prominent far-right website called The Gateway Pundit published the first of a series of articles about Eric. The website's founder, Jim Hoft, summarized the key points in an interview with Steve Bannon.

It was meant to be a voter cleanup organization. And what it is, is actually just a membership organization for the blue states, the left-wing organization. And what they do is just register people. The Gateway Pundit has pushed numerous conspiracies in the past, including that survivors of the Parkland shooting in Florida were crisis actors and the birther theory about former President Barack Obama. NPR's investigations team analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media posts and found that the first Gateway Pundit article was the moment when far-right interest in Eric really took off. In the months leading up to the piece, Eric was mentioned a few times a week across four alternative social media sites frequented by the far-right. But the week that the Gateway Pundit released its first

article, that number surged to more than a thousand. When I brought up the site to Ohio's Frank LaRose, he knew exactly what I was talking about. I think that article you mentioned was probably the beginning of it, but this is no secret. There's a lot of false information out there. There have been wild rumors that it was some secretive billionaire that funded the thing and just wild stuff like that, which is, of course, far from the truth. LaRose is talking about George Soros there. The Gateway Pundit alleged that he is somehow behind Eric. So the conspiracy theories really trace back to this article. But the bigger question is still why is a guy like Kyle Ardoin,

who's worked in elections for more than a decade, making policy decisions based on articles in the Gateway Pundit? And to try to find that answer, we head to a town hall event in Houma, Louisiana. It is my honor to welcome each of you here. Ardoin said little publicly about his Eric decision last January. But he did bring the announcement to perhaps the only constituents at that time who would even care.

We the People, the Bayou chapter. I've been communicating with individuals from We the People from all across the state on a regular basis. It is phenomenal to have citizen activists. The group is one of several chapters in the state and one of hundreds of grassroots organizations across the country motivated by Trump's voting conspiracy theories that have popped up since 2020. They're part of a new election denial blueprint that helps propel fringe ideas into government action. When Ardwin announced his decision to withdraw from Eric, the room cheered. This week, I sent a letter to the election registration information center, suspending Louisiana's participation in that program.

But what's really striking is the timing. The event was publicized less than 24 hours before Ardoin's office officially pulled out of Eric. Our investigation is the first report that Ardoin announced his decision to this activist group. Around this time, Ohio's Frank LaRose talked to Ardoin about Eric. I'll let him speak for himself on this, but to say he acknowledged to me that it had become very politically unpopular and that there had been a lot of heat politically about it. Ardoin was gearing up to run for reelection this year, and LaRose noted that Eric has become a key topic in Republican primaries, where candidates cater to the diehard members of the party, the small percentage of people who vote in these sorts of elections. You could see where somebody who's out there trying to prove their conservative

bona fides in a primary, which is what you do, would read this article and say, OK, that thing is bad. Let's get our state out of it. But hopefully over time, the noise about this starts to die down and other states look to get back into it. Remember that last thing LaRose just said. We'll come back to it. After Louisiana pulled out, the second domino to fall was Alabama. We saw what happened in 2020 around the country and how disturbing that was. So no drop boxes, no mass mailing of ballots, no internet connection to our machines.

We'll always have paper ballots. This is Wes Allen at a campaign event in his race for Secretary of State of Alabama. Early in his primary run last year, he promised that the state would pull out of Eric on his first day in office if he won. That promise came a week and a half after the Gateway Pundit article, for those keeping track at home. Here's Allen.

You know, election security and integrity and transparency has been at the top of the voters' minds, obviously, since 2020. What's really stark about Allen's decision to withdraw from Eric is that Alabama's previous Secretary of State, John Merrill, a staunch conservative, is also one of Eric's biggest fans. Well, Eric has been one of the most effective tools that we have had in the area of election administration. Nobody has ever been able to introduce any vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, or irregularities related to Eric or the administration of the Eric system,

period. But Wes Allen was looking to distinguish himself. In a state Trump won by almost 30 points in 2020. Allen told me he had not heard of Eric before the Gateway Pundit article, but the issue began to bubble up. We started hearing it on the campaign trail, too. When I would travel and these voters would be at these particular meetings that I would go to, this subject matter came up. But when we got into the actual problems with Eric, Allen told me it wasn't really about that. One issue that keeps coming up, like LaRose mentioned before, is this alleged connection to George Soros. The liberal billionaire is at the center of a lot of false right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracies. The initial Gateway Pundit article calls Eric Soros-funded in its headline. And when Allen made his announcement, he said, quote, Soros can take his minions and his database and troll someone else because Alabamians are going to be off limits permanently. I think I've seen you mention it

before that Eric is Soros funded. It's like this sort of leftist group. But then I see that the Heritage Foundation mentions it as a thing that they recommend states be a part of. I mean, how do you square those two things in your mind? I mean, it's maintained now by the states, but it really doesn't matter in my mind who funded Eric. You know, we're still not going to participate in it. You know, it doesn't matter if it was a leftist group or right group, whoever. We just feel.

And, you know, I heard loud and clear on the campaign trail, that the people of Alabama want their data protected. Just to be clear, the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money to Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped develop Eric. But there's no evidence that Soros has ever had any involvement with Eric. Eric is run solely by the states. Each state appoints a board member. The data security concern Alan mentioned comes up a lot too. But Eric uses a security process

called one-way hashing. Remember Jeff Jonas, who helped create Eric? Here he's explaining how it works, back in 2013. The Reader's Digest version is as follows. If I took a pig and a grinder and made a sausage, if I gave you the grinder and the sausage, could you make a pig? Right. That's a one-way hash.

Essentially, Eric encrypts all the sensitive data it gets from states, like dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, before it even analyzes them. Election officials also stress that most of the data that Eric receives from states is public record anyway. But something that became more and more clear as I talked to Wes Allen was that this was a political decision. I asked him whether he was worried about no longer receiving the data Eric provided. Well, I mean, you know, we recognize that keeping our voter rolls clean is of utmost importance. We've got a great staff in place here inside the Secretary of State's office. So it's going to be a good opportunity for us to maintain our oversight on our voter registration list here in Alabama. Are you going to commit more money or hire more staff to do any of this work?

Well, we've got the resources available, and we've got what we need inside the Secretary of State's office to do what we need to do. So Allen was out. And for a while, it looked like the bleeding might stop with those two ruby red states, Louisiana and Alabama. But under the radar, a powerful pressure campaign was building. This spring, the

dam burst. We're back. I'm Miles Parks and this is the Sunday story from Up First. If you trace this idea that this is the Sunday Story from Up First. If you trace this idea that Eric is bad or somehow nefarious back to its very beginnings, you end up at a man named J. Christian Adams. Eric is so diabolical. He's a leading elections voice on the right.

Here he is speaking to conservative radio host John Fredericks in late 2021. Here's the rub, John. When you join Eric, you have to give them your driver's license list. They compare it to your voter list. And your state is obliged to do a mailing campaign to unregistered drivers who aren't registered to vote to try to get them registered. So there's a whole bunch of tentacles here that make it difficult to extract your state from Eric because you have obligations. Adams wrote the first article ever connecting George Soros to Eric back in 2016. And the Gateway Pundit article we keep referencing was built almost exclusively around his writing and his interviews. But up until that piece published, Adams' complaints about Eric had really gone nowhere.

Republican states kept joining, which Adams told me he thinks is a good thing, because it's the only way states have to share information. My view is that it's better to be in Eric than not in Eric. He may have called Eric diabolical, but he told me his issues with Eric are about transparency. He says the organization doesn't disclose enough about how it works, even though states are required by law to disclose to the public how they do list maintenance. But after the Gateway Pundit piece, the narrative around Eric started to shift. How has this turned from a debate over how Eric should operate into states actually leaving? Well, I take some blame for that because I think I wrote the first article about Eric

ever in 2016-ish that wasn't sort of a puff piece at The Atlantic. And it basically described the ups and downs of Eric. And a lot of people focus only on the downs and not the ups. Essentially, the far right took his critiques and ran with them, serving them to a growing grassroots network of people primed to mistrust elections. Folks on the left side of the spectrum need to pay close attention to this because I think they're more afraid of it and think it's temporary, but they're wrong on both counts. The citizens on the right have, after 2020, gotten highly engaged in election administration. They're not going away. He told me they're not always doing harm either.

You know, it wasn't long ago that everybody on each side of the political spectrum was a fan of transparency, a fan of citizens being allowed to know what their government was doing. And that's what these individuals view themselves as doing, is trying to get to the bottom of what Eric is up to. And this is where Cleta Mitchell comes in. She's the Republican lawyer trying to take down Eric. And by the way, she's also the board chair of Adams Voting Advocacy Group. Mitchell declined to be interviewed for this story. But in a text, she told me she first heard about Eric when Louisiana pulled out. Since the 2020 election, Mitchell's been building a network of so-called election integrity groups all over the country.

And last spring, one of these groups in Michigan wrote about Eric on its website for the first time. The group's leader, Patrice Johnson, joined Mitchell's podcast shortly after. It's supposed to be cleaning the voter rolls, but it's not. It is a covert method of registering targeted voters. I'm just thrilled that you are working on Eric, and we want more citizens to say to their legislators, do not continue your membership, withdraw their membership.

Election integrity groups picked up the cue and flooded local politicians with anti-Eric messaging. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told me it became clear when the signal went out about Eric. We saw an uptick in Republican legislators wanting to know more about Eric, almost as if there was some sort of national effort to ask Republican lawmakers and secretaries of states to start asking questions and challenging it. One group in Texas even claimed it helped write legislation that would remove the state from Eric. In Pennsylvania, a woman named Heather Honey took up the cause. Here's Cleta Mitchell's podcast again. We are delighted today to have with us someone who has exemplified exactly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about citizen engagement to save our election system. And she's here with us today. Her name is Heather Honey. Honey worked on the widely discredited 2020 election audit in Maricopa County, Arizona. She has a company that

does election integrity sleuthing. I do investigations. I do open source intelligence training. Before I had my kids, I was working for Ralph Lauren doing their internal investigations. Last year, Honey put out a 29-page report calling Eric a threat to election integrity on the same day that Mitchell convened a secret meeting in Washington. Honey gave an hour-long presentation there to a bunch of election officials from red states. We found out about it from an investigative nonprofit called Documented. They obtained an agenda from the meeting and shared it with us. I tried to reach out to Honey multiple times but never heard back. It's not clear whether she volunteered or was paid to produce her report. When I asked J. Christian Adams, Eric's early critic, about Honey, he was clearly shocked at

how far her work had circulated. I'm trying to get just kind of get my head around how this thing has evolved over the last two years to kind of leave Eric caucus, for lack of a better phrase. Right. And have you have you have you talked to Heather Honey? Have you talked to any of the people? Gracious. Is that a yes or no? I can't remember. But the mere fact that you have uttered this name in the studio, a name I did not expect to hear today.

Honey's report became a key data point in the far-right's campaign against Eric. She's talked with a bunch of local election integrity groups. Here she is speaking at a conference of Republican activists in Pennsylvania. This recording was also obtained by Documented. So generally speaking, Eric, talking points, if you go out and talk to your representatives, talk to your senators, make sure that they know that this is an unnecessary sharing of highly sensitive Social Security number, driver's license data on all of us, including our children. And what the secretary signed on for is not good for our state.

And we really have to fight to get out of there. So as these talking points began to spread last summer, election directors started feeling the pressure. Voters and local politicians started reaching out to them with all sorts of questions. Eric members began to worry they were facing a mass exodus, even though at that point, only Louisiana had left. Then, the anti-Eric forces were handed a gift. Breaking news right now. Governor Ron DeSantis just announced the appointment of a new secretary of state, Representative Cord Bird.

State Representative Cord Bird. He's from Neptune Beach and represents Nassau County. Cord Bird previously declined to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election. And he's close with Cleta Mitchell. He's a dear friend and a real friend of election integrity. And that is Cord Bird. Mitchell has said he often chimed in on her weekly election integrity calls. You've had such a great open door and willing to listen, and you are very much appreciated.

Byrd declined an NPR request for an interview. But Florida's stance on Eric shifted almost immediately after he got the job. Florida was one of Eric's newest member states, having joined in 2019. And DeSantis is on record as supporting it as recently as last year. It's going to trigger if you actually vote in both places in a primary or in a general election. We have the ability to match those records through the ERIC system for most states now. He made a big deal of starting what was essentially an elections police force, which specifically said it used ERIC data to investigate election crimes.

But a few months after Byrd was appointed, Florida just stopped complying with one of the ERIC requirements, reaching out to eligible but unregistered voters. That outreach is at the center of the claim that ERIC is a left-wing ploy to register voters and steal elections. Here's Heather Honey again, talking at an activist event. So the impact of Eric is that they, instead of cleaning up our voter rolls, they bloat the rolls.

They add more people to it, people who don't really even aren't interested or disengaged, don't really want to register, but they just, you know, you ask them enough times, they're going to say yes. Florida was the first state to break Eric's rules so blatantly, and the organization was left scrambling to respond. Some members began pushing a desperate new plan based on red state demands. No more required outreach to new voters. The plan would allow Florida and any other state to essentially do whatever they want

if they would just stay in Eric. The idea initially had buy-in, until a number of Democrats, like Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, pushed back against the Republican pressure. I don't think any state appreciates it when Eric has a gun to its head. And that feels an awful lot like what happened. Also on the table, a Republican demand to cut out Eric's founder, David Becker. Becker's involvement as a non-voting advisor had become a key conspiracy plot point. In 2020, he helped administer millions of dollars of grants from

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to help election officials respond to the pandemic. For the far right, that was evidence that he was a liberal operative, even though that money went to both Republican and Democratic districts. In March of 2023, Eric was set to vote on all these Republican demands. But before that even happened... Three more states say they will stop using a computer tool that helps to keep voter lists accurate. The exodus began. Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia are the latest to drop out.

The states complained that Eric was being partisan and dismissive of their concerns. Now short three more members, that March meeting still went ahead. David Becker wrestled with the decision and ultimately resigned from his advisory role. But Eric didn't change its requirement structure. And so red states kept leaving. Virginia, which was a founding member and joined under a Republican governor. Iowa, whose Secretary of State Paul Pate told me this in February. The ERIC program is, for us, been a godsend.

Pate released a statement saying ERIC would be less useful now with other states leaving. Also out, Ohio. But I can tell you that it is one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have. It's a tool that has provided great benefit for us, and we're going to continue to use it. That's Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Also in February. You've already heard him praising Eric a lot in this story. So what changed?

He told me Eric was being inflexible. Unfortunately, the organization just seemed to dig in and fight on this. And so after a year of trying to preserve what I thought was, you know, could have been a useful institution, had been a useful institution for a long time, we arrived at the point where my decision was that it's worth saving, but it's not worth saving at any cost. Just to be clear, Ohio was an Eric member for six years, and these concerns didn't come up until the far right started targeting it. Still, LaRose is adamant that the misinformation campaign did not influence his decision making. Wild ideas about conspiracies of, you know, data leaking out the back door and secret funding sources and all that kind of stuff. I've rejected all of that. And what we've said all along is that this organization needs to be more accountable. It's worth noting that LaRose is widely expected to make a run for

U.S. Senate. He's not the only Republican who satisfied the base by pulling out of Eric and is now eyeing a promotion. In Florida, Governor DeSantis, who appointed Cord Byrd, is running in the Republican presidential primary. The secretaries of state in both West Virginia and Missouri, Mac Warner and Jay Ashcroft, have both announced runs for governor. When Ashcroft joined Cleta Mitchell on her podcast this year, he alluded to initially not wanting to pull out of Eric when she first approached him. You're somebody who really studied that very hard, went into it not to be influenced by the likes of me or anybody else. We've cussed and discussed about it.

We got emails that showed Ashcroft's staff spent much of last year fending off Eric conspiracy theories from Missouri voters. But ultimately, Mitchell got her way. You have a lot of credibility with people because of that leadership. I hope so. There are a lot of people that think I should have left a lot earlier. Well, you know. Including you, I think. I'm just glad you left.

The day Missouri pulled out, the Gateway Pundit reported that Ashcroft told them before telling the public. You have to be really careful about thinking that you can respond to bullies and conspiracy theorists by capitulating to them. Eric founder David Becker again. He says giving conspiracy-minded people what they want is dangerous because they'll never be satisfied. If you look in a variety of states and a variety of elected officials have thought they could just give the mouse a cookie and it'll go away. The mouse never goes away. For the record, Eric is still standing, though with less shared data and higher costs for remaining members. Some red state legislatures are considering banning it, but the partnership still has more than two dozen member states, including Republican governments like South Carolina, Utah, and Georgia.

They're all still sharing voting data. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, told me that this mass exodus will mostly be felt in the places that left. It actually hurts that state more than it hurts us. So they just basically indirectly said we're going to have dirtier voter rolls over there. But how will that actually play out on the ground in the hundreds of voting jurisdictions now without access to Eric? Brianna Lennon is a Democrat who runs elections for Missouri's Boone County. And she found out her state was pulling out.

When the secretary released the press release. Her office has relied on Eric reports for information on voters who changed addresses and voters who died in other states. Now, they'll be waiting for returned mail. The little yellow sticker that says this person is now living in Georgia or something like that, that's what we'll have to go back to using. None of the secretaries who announced their departure from Eric have detailed how they will replicate all the data they got from it. Some Republican groups and officials, including Ohio's LaRose,

have started exploring new data-sharing systems to recreate some of what Eric does. But building a partnership with more than just a couple states is really complicated, especially ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In Missouri, Lennon says she's worried about the accuracy of her voting list for that election. But she's just as worried about the power of the grassroots movements that targeted Eric. There have been stronger pushes towards some of the initiatives that the We the People groups have been putting forth. this is perhaps the first time that I've seen an actual policy decision that lines up with one of those. For her, this is clearly bigger than Eric.

I'm sure there are going to be ripples that come from this particular move. And I'm not exactly sure what the end will be. I don't think that this is the, I don't think this is an isolated thing. And one final note. Remember Louisiana's Kyle Ardoin, the first official to pull out of Eric? As we finished reporting this story, he announced that he was no longer running for re-election. At a voting event this spring, he said reasoning with people who believe conspiracies feels like a losing battle. People who want to find the boogeyman,

you're never going to be able to tell them that the boogeyman doesn't exist. In his retirement announcement, he said, It is shameful and outright dangerous that a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods. NPR's voting correspondent, Miles Parks.

This story was produced by Monika Efstatieva and edited by Ben Swayze and Barry Hardiman. Data reporting by Nicholas McMillan. Fact-checking by Barbara Van Workum. And audio engineering by James Willits. I'm Rachel Martin. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Thank you.