Texas announces voter-data sharing agreements with other states, keeps them private

Jane Nelson, Texas’ secretary of state, announced last week that her office had accumulated agreements with nine other states to share voter registration data, thereby “strengthening efforts to prevent duplicate registrations.”

The state forged its first memorandum of understanding with Louisiana last February and eight others followed, including with Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, West Virginia and other conservative states, leading up to last week’s announcement. Nelson said in a press release that the agreements establish “a secure and cooperative process” for comparing voter records that will help prevent voter fraud. (StateScoop has requested access to the memorandums to gain further insight into this process.)

Such agreements could be especially valuable for validating voter data in Texas after the state left the Electronic Registration Information Center in 2023, a decision Nelson at the time attributed to the cost of participation. “Texas would be paying more for less data,” she told Politico, citing the group’s fee structure, which spreads operational costs across its members, and the then-recent departure of several other conservative states.

With 25 state members, plus Washington, D.C., ERIC is the largest election data clearinghouse in the United States, and is in fact the only of its kind. Alabama operates something it calls the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, which, as in Texas, includes a smattering of state-to-state agreements with other conservative administrations. But unlike with ERIC, involvement in AVID — or a Texas pact — does not constitute membership in a broader data-sharing group.

Florida, for instance, has forged an agreement with Alabama to share voter registration data and is in that sense a member of AVID. But Texas, which also has joined AVID, does not have access to Florida’s voter data, because it does not have a state-to-state agreement with Florida. ERIC, conversely, pools the data of its members and shares all relevant information — about voters who’ve moved but did not notify their home state, for instance.

Nelson’s office said the recent agreements are used in conjunction with other methods of verifying voter data, such as using Texas state agency records and federal databases provided by the Social Security Administration and the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Checking federal lists like the National Death Index is a common practice for secretaries of state cleaning their voter rolls.

Nelson also said the agreements “serve as a model for future partnerships” and that Texas plans to create additional agreements that will “identify cross-state duplicate registrations and prevent voting in multiple jurisdictions.”

Alabama, Ohio, Texas and other states have left ERIC after raising complaints of leftist-partisanship. But the ad-hoc agreements that are replacing the network model used by ERIC have concerned some pundits, particularly when it comes to their reliability (AVID doesn’t share motor vehicle data, which some experts have said is essential for accuracy) and lack of transparency. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen’s office has repeatedly ignored or denied requests for more information about how AVID works.

And though in Texas Nelson promises the agreements represent “an effective framework for safeguarding” voter rolls, election security and privacy advocates are unsatisfied. 

David Becker, executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, has told this publication and others that AVID “isn’t even a system,” a complaint leveled, seemingly, against the marketing that conceals the cobweb of interstate agreements Alabama’s secretary of state manages. 

Becker, who helped establish and once led ERIC, said over email that Alabama and Texas must share more information about what security and privacy protections are in place when states transmit their voter data over state lines. In Texas, he said, the recently disclosed agreements pose a unique concern: “An announcement of MOU doesn’t mean much without a disclosure of the MOUs.”