Leubsdorf: GOP attacks agency key to stopping voter fraud

At its height, it included 31 states and the District of Columbia, run by both Democrats and Republicans. Texas is the ninth state where Republican officials have withdrawn from ERIC in the past 17 months.

The exodus started after four false January 2021 articles on the Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorialist right-wing website that previously peddled such falsehoods as Barack Obama’s alleged Kenya birthplace and claims that COVID vaccines were worse than the virus. They alleged ERIC was “a left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” financed by Soros to help the Democrats win elections.

The allegations stemmed from a contribution by the Open Society Foundations, a Soros-created philanthropic network, to a project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which later helped fund ERIC. The connection is tenuous; neither the Hungarian American billionaire — a major Democratic donor — nor his foundation has had any direct involvement in ERIC.

A second GOP target is David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who helped found ERIC and now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to help local election agencies.

Most of this is Republican politics.

In Alabama last year, GOP secretary of state hopeful Wes Allen made withdrawal from ERIC a primary campaign issue. Once elected, he followed through. Other states that have withdrawn are Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia ,Virginia and Texas.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Frank LaRose abandoned his prior support for ERIC while considering entry into the GOP primary for U.S. senator. He cited its failure “to embrace reforms that would bolster confidence in its performance” and choosing “to double-down on poor strategic decisions, which have only resulted in the transformation of a previously bipartisan organization to one that appears to favor only the interests of one political party.”

His decision came after an unsuccessful effort to curb ERIC’s requirement that it reach out to unregistered voters and then require the states to contact them. Republicans implied this helps the Democrats because a majority of unregistered voters lean left. Indeed, two studies showed a slight Democratic advantage among them.

Given the lack of true voter fraud, it’s long been evident that desire to satisfy its pro-Trump base has motivated most Republican efforts to restrict voting. It’s even more evident as GOP-run states try to wreck the one agency designed to prevent fraud.