Thread by @donmoyn

New, from me: There is a useful distinction between cheap talk and revealed preferences.

For the far right, the cheap talk is about election integrity, but Republican abandonment of ERIC reveals a preference for the Big Lie and voter suppression.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-far-righ…

Dems have always claimed GOP election policies were about voter suppression. To sort out these narratives, it would be nice to have a clean example of where Republicans walked away from an election tool that unambiguously improved election integrity.

ERIC is that example.

ERIC had been uncontroversial. Republican officials knew it worked well. Then one dropped out of the program. Why?
A week before, Gateway Pundit, the same source which labeled Parkland shooting victims as crisis actors, declared it to be a Soros-funded conspiracy.

Keeping the voter rolls up to date is a basic task for election administration. But surely we can use modern data science techniques like ERIC to do it better than sending out postcards, or just purging people who do not vote in the last few elections.

So what is the real objection to ERIC that caused the far right to target it? The program requires that states notify eligible voters that they are eligible. Basic, minimal outreach.
But if you political movement is built on limiting the vote, this sounds like a conspiracy.

There is another layer to this story, which is exemplified by the role of Cleta Mitchell, who heads the "Election Integrity Network" and has pressed GOP officials to abandon ERIC. You might remember Mitchell as part of Trump's team trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Mitchell resigned from her law firm and devoted herself full time to Big Lie activism. She is training poll watchers to verify voter rolls. In other words, she wants partisan amateurs to replace professional election officials and ERIC.

The line between fraud and voter outreach is blurred in Mitchell’s mind. Election integrity seems to be less about minimizing illegal voting and more about minimizing voting more generally, or at least minimizing the influence of voters not aligned with Republicans.

The term Orwellian is overused, but it surely applies to a situation where the leader of the Election Integrity Network works against a proven tool to protect election integrity. And Mitchell has been successful.

Sorry for the long thread. If you like writing at the intersection of politics, policy and administration, please share or please consider subscribing to my free newsletter. It is getting harder to use Twitter, and Musk is still suppressing Substack posts. donmoynihan.substack.com

I drew a lot from incredible reporting by @MilesParks who talked about what he found here.