Conservative states are building their own voter database

Ohio last week became the latest state to join a voter registration database operated by Alabama, further widening the rift between how Democratic and Republican leaders administer elections.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced that Ohio is the ninth state to begin using the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID, which he spearheaded shortly after taking office in 2023, when he targeted a state voter file that he described as a “bloated mess” before removing nearly 500,000 names.

A memorandum of understanding between Ohio and Alabama outlines a one-year agreement to share voter registration data, with the aim of ensuring no one is voting in multiple states. In a press release, Allen said the agreement will result in “a cleaner, more accurate voter file for both Alabamians and Ohioans alike.”

AVID’s website notes that the program relies on state records, the U.S. Postal Service’s national change of address file and the Social Security death index. But Alabama hasn’t otherwise shared publicly how the system works, or how voter data is shared between states. The Ohio agreement notes only that voter information is shared using “standard encryption technology and passwords.”

Allen’s office did not respond to questions about how the system works or the names of its administrators.

With the exception of Kentucky, all of AVID’s member states — Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas and Tennessee — are led by Republican governors. The growing consortium of conservative states has been paired with an exodus from a larger, bipartisan cooperative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which was established in 2012 to mitigate challenges posed by the lack of a national voter database.

ERIC is funded by dues paid by its remaining members: 24 states and the District of Columbia. When asked by email why Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose left ERIC, a spokesperson said the reason was that ERIC has stubbornly rejected measures for accountability and nonpartisan leadership.

“Rather, they have chosen to double-down on poor strategic decisions, which have only resulted in the transformation of a previously bipartisan organization to one that appears to favor only the interests of one political party,” LaRose’s spokesperson wrote.

In a March 2023 letter to ERIC’s administrators, LaRose noted that ERIC was “the only advanced election integrity resource of its kind” and that it had helped Ohio identify hundreds of cases of potential voter fraud. The value of ERIC membership, he said, was “tangible.”

LaRose went on in his letter to request reforms, such as the addition of an option for states to use ERIC’s data-sharing services “a la carte,” thereby allowing states to avoid requirements and analyses they deemed unnecessary. He also requested the group remove ex-officio membership positions. He cited, but did not name, one particularly “polarizing” ex-officio member whom he said had prevented “long-overdue reforms to ERIC’s governing documents.”

David Becker, an elections administration expert who played a central role in founding ERIC, has for several years contended that the effort to recreate the cooperative under a new name would be difficult and pointless. But AVID, he told StateScoop, amounts to even less than that.

“AVID still appears not to be a system at all, but simply the Alabama State voter registration database,” Becker wrote in an email. “And ‘joining AVID’ appears to simply be two states agreeing to share highly sensitive personal data on their citizens with each other, without any specificity on security for transmission and storage. I think both Ohio and Alabama citizens have an interest in knowing how their highly sensitive personal data is going to be transmitted to other states, and how it will be stored once it’s out of their own state’s control.”

David Levine, senior fellow at the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, has likewise been critical of AVID’s lack of transparency since Allen unveiled his plans in 2023. In an opinion piece at the time, he pointed to similar past efforts, such as one in Kansas that resulted in a data breach.

“They’re largely trying to build what one would call the ugly stepchild version of ERIC,” Levine said in an interview.

Beyond issues of data security, Levine said, AVID’s efficacy is hamstrung by its limited membership, which happens to be one of the criticisms some Republican leaders have leveled at ERIC. As each member has left ERIC in recent years, dues for remaining states — totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars for each — have risen, and states have received less data in return.

Levine, a former elections administrator in Idaho, said one of his chief concerns with AVID is that its states are not sharing driver’s license data, making identifying unique individuals with common names a “tedious, manual process” that will burden resource-strapped election offices.

“At a time when election officials are trying to do a lot with a little, having potential duplicates and worrying about whether they’re going to disenfranchise otherwise eligible voters is a problem,” he said. “There does not appear to be a good reason for folks to pull out of ERIC. And that’s one of the saddest parts, because most democracies have a centralized voter registry, and ERIC was, frankly, a really good solution for helping get at this issue.”

Levine said he believes the true motivation for many Republicans leaving ERIC has been strictly political, as association with ERIC could be perceived by President Donald Trump and the Republican party as a failed purity test. He pointed to LaRose’s past consideration of a run at the Senate, Allen’s plans to run for Alabama’s lieutenant governor in 2026 and former West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner’s current position leading the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

Since Trump’s first day in office, his administration has pushed for reforms to the state’s elections and election security efforts. An executive order Trump signed last month calls on states to purchase new voting machines with capabilities not yet available on the market, which would be designed to correct imagined systemic fraud. And legislation last week approved by the Republican-controlled House would require states to validate proof of citizenship for voter registration.

The measures arrive as the president and other top Republicans make unfounded claims of widespread noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, a phenomenon that repeated studies have proven to be exceptionally rare. The Washington Post last year examined voting data from 2002 to 2023 and found 85 cases of noncitizen voting.

Secretaries of state of all political parties generally agree that even one case of noncitizen voting is too many, but it’s Republicans that have taken up the issue. Twenty-one Republican secretaries of state last month asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to upgrade her department’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, so they can more easily detect noncitizens who are voting in elections.