Court sanctions far-right lawyers over ‘frivolous’ bid to force Wisconsin out of ERIC

By Matt Cohen

FILE - High school students Sawyer Brockman, left, and Jack Skilling volunteer at a voter registration table for the presidential primary election at Windham High School, Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2024, in Windham, N.H. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File) null

A federal court dismissed a far-right group’s lawsuit to ban Wisconsin from sharing voter information with a respected nonpartisan data-sharing network used by a majority of states to maintain accurate voter rolls.  And it sanctioned the group for bringing a frivolous lawsuit. 

The suit, filed by the 1789 Foundation in October 2024, claimed that Wisconsin violated the state’s Driver’s Privacy and Protection Act because it had terminated its membership with the Electronic Registration and Information Center (ERIC) in 2016, but was still sharing data with the network. 

In fact, Wisconsin joined ERIC in 2016 and remains one of 27 states and Washington, D.C. that’s still a member.

“Plaintiffs either failed to conduct a reasonable factual and legal inquiry to uncover this information despite it being required under Rule 11 or plaintiffs ignored this information and chose to file their lawsuit anyway,” U.S. Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee, wrote. “Either way, several assertions in plaintiffs’ complaint are legally and factually frivolous and justify the imposition of sanctions.”

The lawsuit objected to the practice by ERIC members of contacting eligible but unregistered voters, using data from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, to encourage them to register. The suit also falsely claimed that ERIC shared data with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) — a nonprofit pro-elections group founded by the election administration expert David Becker — who helped to contact unregistered voters, which Conley wrote was “factually frivolous.”

Since its founding in 2012, ERIC has been considered the gold standard in helping states maintain accurate voter records. At its peak, nearly 40 states were members of ERIC. But red states, motivated largely by a similar aversion to encouraging unregistered voters to get on the rolls, began pulling out after a cascade of disinformation and conspiracy theories from far-right media in 2022. 

The Wisconsin case wasn’t the only lawsuit the 1789 Foundation filed in the weeks before the 2024 election. The group — which sometimes operates under the name Citizen_AG — filed two other lawsuits targeting voter rolls in key battleground states: Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both of those lawsuits were dismissed. 

Correction: This article originally stated that ERIC and CEIR used Wisconsin Department of Transportation data to contact eligible, unregistered voters. It has been updated to reflect that only ERIC members contacted eligible unregistered Wisconsin voters.