Virginia rejoins voter-registration data-sharing group after controversial exit
Nearly three years after leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, Virginia has renewed its membership with the nonprofit that allows states to share voter registration data to ensure only those allowed to vote may do so.
Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor, announced Thursday that the state has rejoined ERIC, as its 27th member, after the state pulled out in 2023 under the direction of former Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In an executive order in March, Spanberger said not participating in ERIC had made it “more difficult for Virginia’s election administrators to obtain information to help maintain Virginia’s voter rolls and otherwise engage in routine voter list maintenance,” such as identifying voters who’d moved to other states. In a press release on Thursday, Steven Koski, Virginia’s elections commissioner, claimed that rejoining ERIC will provide “a key source of information that will bolster our comprehensive voter list maintenance processes.”
Virginia was one of a handful of states to drop its membership in ERIC in 2023 amid complaints from conservative officials that the nonprofit, which claims both red and blue states among its members, had instituted policies violating its nonpartisan charter. In a letter explaining the state’s departure from ERIC in May 2023, Susan Beals, then Virginia’s elections commissioner, cited rising costs of membership, “increasing concerns regarding stewardship, maintenance, privacy, and confidentiality of voter information” and “controversy surrounding the historical sharing of data with outside organizations leveraged for political purposes.” Virginia was one in an initial group of seven states to leave the group.
Virginia was also one of seven states to found ERIC, in 2012, with the aim of securely and legally sharing voter registration information across state lines to improve the integrity of elections. Now again an ERIC member, Virginia plans to integrate the group’s four voter-registration list maintenance reports — cross-state movers, in-state movers, duplicates and deceased — into the commonwealth’s voter-roll maintenance procedures. According to Spanberger’s March order, the ERIC reports will aid a requirement that voter roll maintenance is completed within 90 days of every federal primary and general election, “to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters,” including those who lack evidence of eligible residence or citizenship.
Some conservative leaders have taken to suggesting or claiming outright that untold numbers of noncitizens are voting in elections in the United States. President Donald Trump has amplified that notion numerous times, including in February when he again claimed, without evidence, that “these people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.” The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that maintains a database of election fraud cases, has identified fewer than 100 cases of noncitizen voting since 1982.
The rift between Democrats and some Republicans on the topic of noncitizen voting has spurred along alternative means of verifying states’ voter rolls. The second Trump administration repurposed the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, a tool designed to verify the eligibility of noncitizens for certain benefits, to find noncitizen voters. Some conservative states, meanwhile, including those that made loud exits from ERIC, started their own ad-hoc networks for sharing voter-registration data across state lines. The most advertised of these is the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, or AVID, though it differs from ERIC in that it’s not a membership organization, but simply the name Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, has given to a series of limited interstate data-sharing agreements. Both advocates and detractors of AVID have noted that these agreements are disadvantaged by states’ inability to share identity information managed by motor-vehicle bureaus, one of the most effective and reliable means of cross-checking voter registration data.
