I just wanted to get the latest version of Missouri’s voter registration database cleaned up to load into The Accountability Project, a database of 1.9 billion public records.
Working on TAP is a part of my job here at the Center for Public Integrity as a data reporter for local initiatives. While I was preparing the voter registration data, I did the general quality checks that any journalist exploring data would do.
That’s when I ran into some issues. Several, I discovered, were common with voter registration data: People move and die all the time, and keeping the rolls updated is a moving target. Got it. So, how do states try to keep up?
The answer a bunch of them settled on was the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. The partnership, funded by states, helps them with that “list maintenance” work.
I had no idea until I started digging in how politicized that bureaucratic process has become.
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Nine states, including Missouri, have pulled out of ERIC since 2022. All the moves were driven by Republican leaders in the wake of misinformation about the group — some of it spread by former President Donald Trump.
Usually, when a system or institution in the U.S. stops working, the most vulnerable groups of people are affected first and the most. I’ve seen this show up in data over and over. I wanted to find out if states leaving ERIC would hurt some voters more than others.
I took the question to Michael Morse, a political scientist and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and he guided me toward Census mobility data. That would help me see who changes addresses more often, the people more likely to end up with a registration problem on Election Day if list maintenance falls short.
People of color, low income residents and younger Americans are all in this group, the data showed me.
Next, I turned to local election officials and other election-administration experts. Did they agree with Morse that an increase in change-of-address forms meant more congestion at polls? Eric Fey, the Democratic director of elections in St. Louis County, said yes, he’s worried about more lines and congestion. He and his Republican counterpart, Rick Stream, also told me that the work they do will be harder now without ERIC.
Along the way, I worked to put this into the context readers would need: a history of voter suppression tactics used against the same groups of people who move more often, and scattershot federal election administration laws written before the Internet as we know it changed the world.
I realized fairly early on that this wasn’t going to be a traditional “data reporting” story. It was a story about data — how states handle their voter registration database and whether the elected officials making decisions about it understand how that data works.
What resulted was a piece about an issue that fell under the radar until misinformation about ERIC began circling. Thinking about how your state deals with its voter registration database probably isn’t top of mind for you — and it shouldn’t have to be. It should be a quiet, routine process that election officials have the information they need to complete.
It’s not clear yet what the states that left ERIC will do to replace the information they were getting from that partnership. But we know from past missteps that this work can go badly wrong.
I’ve put in records requests to learn more.
Future data to look at, perhaps.
Reporting on this in your state? Get in touch with Janelle to team up at reportingeric1@gmail.com.