Another Bizarre Gableman Proposal

Among the recommendations that Michael Gableman makes in his Second Interim Investigative Report On the Apparatus & Procedures of the Wisconsin Elections System is this:

6. Exit the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). The State of Wisconsin pays this outside group six figures per year to assist it in cleaning up our voter rolls, but receives little to no benefit from it. In fact, as was recently noted in testimony before the Assembly, the contract with ERIC ties the hands of election officials in numerous ways. The State can seek lawful, bilateral agreements with States to ensure only lawful voters are on the rolls, without the concerns about partisanship.

This paragraph is the only mention that Gableman makes of ERIC in his 136-page report. Nowhere does he try to back up his claims or to specify how ERIC “ties the hands” of election officials. What is ERIC and why does Gableman want to get rid of it?

ERIC is a non-profit organization aimed at making voter registration data more accurate. It takes data from various sources, including Social Security death data, US Postal Service change-of-address data, auto registration data, and voter registration lists from the member states in order to identify voters who have moved, died, or have duplicate registrations. Slightly over half the states belong to ERIC.

Earlier this year, the Gateway Pundit, a far-right website, published three articles claiming that ERIC was part of a left-wing election conspiracy. The headline on the article was “Who’s ‘Cleaning’ Our Voter Rolls? Soros Funded ERIC Is Now Used In 31 States”

I could not find any evidence that any funding for ERIC came from George Soros—a favorite villain of the extreme right and of post-Soviet dictators. A link that was described as having documents that would support that assertion had no documents. Gateway Pundit is well-known for deliberately publishing disinformation purporting to be real news. Yet, within a week of the first Gateway article, Louisiana’s Secretary of State announced that Louisiana was dropping its membership in ERIC. Was Gableman also influenced by these articles?

An earlier attempt than ERIC at cross-checking registration among states, started in 2005, ended in failure. Called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, it was widely promoted by Kris Kobach, the then-Kansas Secretary of State.

However, it suffered from bad design. Reportedly, matches were made using only a person’s first and last names and their birth dates. It turns out there are numerous people sharing names with other people born on the same day. This led to lots of false positives, resulting in legal voters being struck from the rolls.

This led to states withdrawing from Crosscheck, citing inaccurate data and a risk to privacy rights. In December 2019, the program was suspended indefinitely as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

The failure of Crosscheck helped lead to the development of ERIC, with logistical and financial support from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The main complaint from the Gateway Pundit seems to be based on the claim that ERIC was established by liberal states as a way to take over information on voters. Yet today, our two largest red states—Texas and Florida—are members; our two largest blue states—California and New York—are not.

There is a certain irony to conservatives’ attacks on ERIC (see this NPR story on the controversy). While obsessing about voter fraud, they are here rejecting a tool to weed out certain types of fraud—particularly fraud making use of multiple addresses.

Not everyone on the political right shares Gableman’s disdain for ERIC. A lawsuit (Timothy Zignego v. Wisconsin Elections Commission) brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) demanded that the Wisconsin Elections Commission purge the voter rolls based on ERIC reports. WILL’s lawsuit failed on a 5-2 vote of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. State law assigns the job of removing invalid voter registrations to municipal election commissions and clerks, not to the state elections commission.

In recommending that Wisconsin drop out of ERIC, Gableman claims that the “State of Wisconsin pays this outside group six figures per year.” But ERIC says that annual member dues for 2021-22 range from about $16,000 to about $74,000. Even if Wisconsin paid dues at the top of the scale, it would not be “six figures.” In fact, if we assume that Wisconsin’s dues in the middle, say $45,000, and used the widely quoted figure of $676,000 for the cost of Gableman’s investigation, his budget would pay for 15 years of ERIC membership dues.

Under normal circumstances, if one were looking for someone to lead an investigation into some event, whether an election or something else, one would look for competence and integrity and the willingness to meet with folks on all sides. Clearly, Gableman is not that person.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has already earned Donald Trump’s disapproval for not being sufficiently loyal. If Vos had chosen a person who could write a credible analysis, it is likely that both Vos and his designee would face a Trump tongue lashing with both being called “anti-Trump” or RINOs. To avoid that Vos appointed Gableman, whose useless report is being paid for by the taxpayers.