After Leaving ERIC, Louisiana Will Now Share Voter List Data With Alabama
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry (R) announced on Wednesday that the Pelican State signed an agreement with Alabama to share voter list maintenance data between the two states.
The agreement comes amid a mass exodus of red states from the Election Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan organization that helps to coordinate accurate voter registration data between states across the country. ERIC was once seen as an uncontroversial and bipartisan effort that, at one point, counted more than 30 states as participants. It’s since become the target of right-wing conspiracy theories and disinformation.
Louisiana was the first state to withdraw participation from ERIC after a 2022 article from the far-right website The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed it to be “essentially a left wing voter registration drive all paid for by the States.” At the time, a press release from former Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin (R) cited “concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports about potential questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes, potentially undermining voter confidence.”
Alabama soon joined Louisiana in withdrawing their participation in ERIC and launched their own voter list database, the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) in September of 2023. Alabama then secured agreements with other states that left ERIC — Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida and Tennessee — to share voter registration data. AVID essentially provides the same service as ERIC but without the independent, third-party maintenance of the database, nor without data from the dozens of states that participate in ERIC. The result is a voter registration database that some voting experts warned isn’t as accurate or effective as ERIC.