Thread by @MilesParks

This weekend, @NPR published a months-long investigation into a simple question:

Why are Republicans abandoning one of the best tools the government has to find voter fraud?

We uncovered a complex far right pressure campaign, and an election denial blueprint for 2024...

The tool is the Electronic Registration Information Center -- better known as ERIC. It allows states to share data to keep their voter rolls more up to date.

And it is the ONLY system to catch people who vote in two different states in the same election. That's illegal!!

But last January - a far-right website started targeting ERIC.

Saying that... even though it had roughly half Republican states... It was ACTUALLY a leftist effort aimed at registering voters to help Democrats...

Election denialists online found their new target:

So why does this matter? BS pops up online all the time.

Well, a week after the first bogus article published, Louisiana became the first state to pull out...

The Secretary of state did it quietly, in a press release...

But our NPR investigation found he actually announced the move to a cheering audience of conservative activists. This event was not reported at the time.

npr.org/2023/06/04/117…

We found these sort of activists -- interested in "election integrity" but actually motivated by falsehoods pushed since 2020 by Trump and others -- have become an influential force in American politics.

We found that they organized to pressure state election officials and lawmakers about ERIC:

And we found a key Trump ally at the center of all of this: Cleta Mitchell.

Mitchell was on the '21 phone call where Trump asked GA election officials to "find votes"

She now hosts a podcast about voting, and runs a coalition of local integrity groups

She used all her platforms to run a multi-faceted ERIC campaign...

Thanks to @ItsDocumented, we found that Mitchell even convened an anti-ERIC summit with redstate lawmakers last summer. Here's the agenda:

Secretaries of State from the first five states to leave ERIC attended that meeting.

That's according to an email also shared by @ItsDocumented, from a meeting attendee from North Carolina.

8 states and counting have now pulled out of ERIC. Texas looks almost certain to be number nine.

So what does this all mean for 2024?

Practically speaking, it means less accurate voter rolls in the short term.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told me the states that leave are basically just saying "they're going to have dirtier rolls over there."

For voters, that can manifest in little ways over time. Longer lines at precincts, more election mail sent to wrong addresses aka a waste of taxpayer dollars...

There won't be a BIG blowup that comes from this. Just lots of little things. Voter fraud will be harder to catch

In the bigger picture, it shows the growing influence of the far right.

These Republican officials felt the need to turn their back on a tool they are on the record praising. Because they are also at the whim of Republican primary voters...

But scoring political points with the election denial movement may not be that simple.

The first election official to pull out of ERIC, in Louisiana, recently announced he is no longer seeking re-election.

Due in part... to election conspiracies in his state:

You can read or listen to our full investigation here:

npr.org/2023/06/04/117…