Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced on Thursday that his office has finalized agreements with three states to exchange critical voter data in an effort to bolster transparent and accurate elections.
“Ohio took the lead on this election integrity project, and it’s only one aspect of the work we’re doing to keep our elections honest as we prepare for the next presidential election year,” LaRose said in a statement. Ohio’s new agreements are with Florida, Virginia, and West Virginia.
According to a LaRose press release, these arrangements permit each state to “implement state-specific data sharing and security protocols to allow for the secure exchange of voter information, giving both states in [each individual] agreement the ability to analyze records for evidence of cross-state voter fraud and duplicate voter registrations.”
These new interstate contracts appear to act as replacements for the Electronic Registration Information System (ERIC). ERIC is a widely used voter-roll management group founded by Democrat activist David Becker that was “sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls.”
In actuality, ERIC inflates voter rolls by requiring member states to contact eligible but unregistered residents and encourage them to register to vote. But ERIC’s membership agreement also places a higher priority on registering new voters than cleaning up existing voter rolls. As Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, ERIC mandates states engage in voter list maintenance “only after [they have] independently validated” the data they receive from the organization. In other words, “if a state
