Red States Struggle to Build New Systems to Share Voter Data

Back in 2023, a host of Republican-led states left a successful inter-state compact for sharing voter registration data and keeping their rolls up to date. Falsely portraying the pact as a progressive plot, several states vowed to create better systems of their own.

Two years later, those efforts appear largely to have failed. The most prominent new initiative, built by Alabama, lacks anything close to the sophistication of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the system the red states rejected, experts said. In fact, it isn’t even designed to allow multiple states to share data with each other — the core purpose that ERIC serves.

The failure underscores how, for all the talk on the right about election integrity, in many GOP-led states the goal of making the rolls more accurate may have taken a backseat to getting on the right side of the latest anti-voting crusade.

‘AVID isn’t even a system’

Earlier this month, Virginia became the tenth state to join the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID), the brainchild of Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (R). Allen campaigned in 2022 on pulling the state out of ERIC, and he portrayed AVID the following year as a replacement — but one the state would control itself.

“This is not going to be something that we send to some private nonprofit, third party vendor, out of state. It is going to be something that we control,” Allen said as he unveiled AVID. “This will be an incredible tool in detecting voter fraud and protecting our elections.”

Over one million voters have been flagged by AVID for removal or updates, and nearly half a million have been removed from rolls entirely so far, according Alabama’s own findings

Unlike ERIC, which required states to investigate data and contact voters before removing them, there are no uniform safeguards under AVID. Each state decides what to do with the data it receives.

AVID also appears to be far less effective than ERIC at finding errors on the rolls. It involves only bilateral pacts between Alabama and other states. No mechanism exists for participating states other than Alabama to share data with each other, vastly undermining AVID’s utility as a way of finding errors on the rolls.

“AVID isn’t something that states can join or be a member of. AVID isn’t even a system.” David Becker, who helped develop ERIC and is now the executive director of Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), told Democracy Docket. “AVID is just something that Alabama has named that represents them sharing information with other states one-on-one.”

Just as important, AVID data-sharing agreements don’t include Social Security numbers and driver’s license (DMV) information, which experts say are critical tools for finding accurate matches. Without that essential information, there are increased risks of failing to detect discrepancies and wrongly flagging eligible voters.

“The question isn’t, is this some evil system resulting in voter suppression? The question is, is this AVID thing just a distraction from their failure to conduct good list maintenance?” Becker said. “They’re not able to flag the records of voters who legitimately should be flagged. They’re probably not successful in removing as many ineligible voters from the list as they could have done under ERIC.”

And because AVID lacks independent oversight and public transparency, experts say, there is no way for voters or watchdogs to verify its effectiveness or fairness. 

After a review of all 10 signed MOUs between Alabama and its partner states, none include requirements for audits, public reporting or third-party oversight. The deals say only that data cross checks are to be conducted “a minimum of once per year.”

Alabama and Allen have been trigger-happy in the recent past when it comes to removing voters from the rolls. 

In September, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Alabama and Allen, alleging that systematic voter removals violated federal law by targeting potentially eligible voters, including native-born and naturalized citizens, within 90 days of a federal election

A federal judge granted an injunction, halting further removals and ordering Alabama to notify affected voters. 

Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

What GOP-Led States Left Behind

For over a decade, ERIC was seen as a model of cooperative governance. More than 30 states — red and blue — voluntarily joined the nonprofit system to securely share data and identify voters who had moved, died or were registered in multiple states. ERIC’s cross-state data matching helped states maintain accurate rolls and reach eligible, unregistered voters.

“ERIC has helped member states identify millions of out-of-date records and possible cases of double voting,” Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, told Democracy Docket. “It has helped states improve the accuracy of voter rolls in a way no other system has done.”

But following the 2020 election, conspiracy theories fueled by President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud sought to discredit ERIC. Far-right outlets falsely tied the system to George Soros and election deniers mischaracterized Becker as a Democratic operative.

Allen has given another reason for leaving ERIC — the system’s requirement that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters and urge them to get on the rolls.

“(ERIC) was a way to really identify who was not registered to vote,” he said in a 2023 interview with a conservative radio host. “And then, per the contract, the state would have to contact these voters and encourage them to get registered to vote.”

“Our job is not to turn people out,” Allen added. “That is the job of the candidates — to make people excited to go to the polls. Our job is to make sure Alabama elections are the safest in the country.” 

In March 2023, Trump publicly urged states to leave ERIC.

“All Republican Governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. 

By that fall, nine GOP-led states – Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia – had left ERIC, citing vague claims about privacy or bias, often rooted in the same misinformation.

That group included Ohio, which joined AVID in April. 

Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) had once called ERIC “one of the best fraud‑fighting tools that we have,” but reversed course under pressure from conservative activists, suggesting ERIC “favors only the interests of one political party.”

The Right’s Failed Voter Roll Experiments 

Other attempts to share voter roll information have been no more effective. 

During the 2010s, Kansas operated the now-defunct Crosscheck program. Like AVID, Crosscheck was administered by one state office and lacked the data information necessary to distinguish between voters with similar names. Crosscheck, however, did share data between member states, unlike AVID. 

Crosscheck resulted in thousands of false positives and voter purges that disenfranchised voters. It also led to a major data breach that exposed the personal information of voters. 

“I do not concede there is a problem,” Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) said in a now-deleted tweet responding to the data breach. But he temporarily suspended the program after consultation with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In 2019, after a lawsuit by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Kansas agreed to suspend the program indefinitely.

In the broader GOP scramble to replace ERIC, EagleAI NETwork has emerged as a controversial, far-right alternative. It was developed in 2022 by retired Georgia physician John W. “Rick” Richards Jr., with early design input and rollout support from Trump-aligned Cleta Mitchell, who has been instrumental in pushing anti-ERIC conspiracies. 

EagleAI has been described as “voter fraud vigilantism” as it enables private actors to access its findings and submit voter roll challenges. To date, no challenge by an EagleAI actor has been legally successful. 

Like AVID, the right-wing tool does not use Social Security or official state data, and has no external oversight.