by Maya Homan, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

October 21, 2025

Georgia election officials credit an embattled voter accuracy organization with helping them identify over 180,000 voters who have moved out of state just this year.

But the state could be poised to end its participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, ahead of the 2026 election after the once-obscure organization became the target of right-wing groups.

Founded in 2012, ERIC initially included seven member states who agreed to share data to identify voters who have moved, died, or who cast ballots in more than one state.

In the years since its inception, the organization has expanded to include a total of 25 states and the District of Columbia, with Georgia joining in 2019. Georgia Elections Director Blake Evans also served as the center’s chair from 2024 to 2025.

But in recent years, the organization has also faced pushback from right-wing groups, who have accused ERIC of being part of a conspiracy aimed at helping Democrats win elections. Nine Republican-led states withdrew from the organization between 2022 and 2023. 

A bill that would have made Georgia the 10th state to withdraw from the partnership cleared the Senate during the 2025 legislative session, but failed to gain final passage before the Legislature adjourned for the year. If it had passed, Georgia would have been required to withdraw from ERIC within 90 days of the law taking effect. Since Georgia has two-year legislative sessions, the legislation, House Bill 397, could still be enacted when the Legislature reconvenes in January.

State legislators are currently examining ERIC and other aspects of Georgia’s election policies as part of a House “blue-ribbon” committee, which is expected to provide recommendations ahead of Georgia’s 2026 legislative session. 

ERIC explained

Voter roll maintenance is by no means a new concept. Most states are required to update their voter registration lists under federal policies such as the 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

But before ERIC’s formation more than a decade ago, states sometimes struggled to identify which voters had outdated registrations, or failed to take the necessary steps to maintain voters’ privacy, according to Sean Morales-Doyle, who serves as the director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. 

One previous multistate compact, known as Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, worked by matching a voter’s first name, last name and date of birth against registrations from other member states. However, Morales-Doyle said, Crosscheck and other programs like it often faced accuracy issues that resulted in valid registrations being flagged as potential fraud.

“If you just look at first name, last name, date of birth, you’re actually going to get a lot of false positive matches,” Morales-Doyle said. Crosscheck, which at one point was used by at least 25 states, later became the subject of a class-action lawsuit which alleged that the program produced false positives “more than 99 percent of the time,” and exposed partial Social Security numbers of nearly 1,000 voters in Kansas. It was ultimately suspended until officials could implement new security measures.

ERIC, by contrast, matches information like voters’ Social Security numbers against a broad range of datasets, including those from state motor vehicle departments and the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address program. Crucially, the program also implemented cybersecurity practices to prevent sensitive information from being leaked.

“The big advantage to ERIC is allowing collaboration across states and bringing many of these different sources of information together in one place, but also keeping that information secure,” Morales-Doyle said.

Member states use a process called hashing, which is similar to encryption, to protect voters’ information before it is shared between states, according to ERIC’s executive director, Shane Hamlin. 

“When you encrypt a file, then eventually you’re going to unencrypt it and read it again,” he explained during an October legislative study committee meeting. “Once you hash data, there’s really no going back, and so because we hash it twice in the process we use, it’s really difficult to ever get back to the original value.”

According to Hamlin, the benefits of joining ERIC go beyond data security. Member states have centralized access to a variety of data sources that they might otherwise have to obtain through costly and time-consuming state-to-state partnerships. Georgia’s membership dues were roughly $107,000 in 2025, which Evans, the state’s elections director, said was less than the cost of one data analyst’s salary.

“ERIC is an efficient use of taxpayer dollars,” Hamlin told state legislators. “Being a member has a lower cost than attempting to replicate all that ERIC does in a single system or managing 25 plus state-to-state agreements.”

Right-wing resistance

At its peak, ERIC included more than 30 members, but a wave of GOP-led states began withdrawing from the organization in 2022, after the far-right website The Gateway Pundit began publishing a series of stories that characterized ERIC as a “left wing voter registration drive.” Louisiana soon became the first state to withdraw from the partnership, with the Louisiana secretary of state citing concerns about “potential questionable funding sources” and “partisan actors” gaining access to voter data. Other Southern states soon followed suit, including Florida, Texas and Alabama, which all withdrew in 2023.

For some Republican lawmakers, the departure of other conservative member states — including many of Georgia’s neighbors — poses its own impetus for leaving ERIC.

“I’m starting to wonder how effective it is,” said Rep. Martin Momtahan during an October legislative study committee meeting dedicated to voter roll maintenance. A Dallas Republican, Momtahan sponsored a bill to withdraw Georgia from the partnership during the 2025 legislative session, and his proposal was absorbed into the main election bill left waiting for next year. 

Republicans in states like Missouri and Arizona have also taken issue with the organization’s previous bylaws that required states to reach out to voters who may be eligible to vote and encourage them to register. Last year, Georgia was one of nine states who received an exemption from the voter outreach requirement. In July, ERIC amended its bylaws to make the voter outreach provision optional.

In addition to withdrawing from ERIC, the big pending election bill in Georgia would prevent the state from enrolling in any multistate voter list maintenance compact that “requires or encourages” states to contact unregistered residents and help them to register to vote. 

“We don’t need to mix these subjects,” Momtahan said in an interview. “Ultimately, Georgians should be in control of how we run our elections.”

Momtahan said he hopes there will be an appetite to withdraw Georgia from ERIC next year.

But Rep. Saira Draper, an Atlanta Democrat on the committee, called the conservative exodus from ERIC “a rash reaction to the 2020 election,” and urged her fellow legislators to remain part of the organization. 

“I hope we can see this data for what it is, and look at this evidence for what it is, and understand that this is the most secure system,” Draper said. “If we are serious about election integrity in Georgia, we’re going to help grow this program.”

Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center also expressed skepticism about the efficacy of withdrawing from ERIC.

“Election officials of both parties have long said [ERIC] is their best defense against fraud,” he said. “And now, in the name of stopping fraud, people are advocating for them to pull out of ERIC. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for his part, has publicly defended ERIC, calling it the “only group capable of detecting double voting across state lines” in a 2023 post on social media. Raffensperger, who is running governor, again defended the state’s participation in a statement earlier this month. 

“Georgia is the best state in the nation for secure elections, and we use multi-state voter data-sharing partnerships like the Electronic Registration Information Center to ensure that only eligible, qualified Georgians are on our voter rolls,” he said.

How would Georgia be impacted by leaving ERIC?

States that have withdrawn from ERIC have often pledged to create new compacts to ensure that their voter rolls are up to date. But in many cases, that may be easier said than done, and states that have departed have often struggled to form interstate partnerships that are as complete or as secure as the one maintained by ERIC. 

Georgia has developed a few individual compacts with states that are not members of ERIC, such as Alabama, Virginia and Florida. However, those agreements require much more time and personnel to maintain, and are sometimes limited by conflicting laws around voter privacy, Evans with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office said. With Florida, for instance, Georgia has been unable to share voter data because Florida law does not protect voters’ full dates of birth, while Georgia law requires that the month and day of birth remain confidential. 

“We will not sacrifice security of our voters’ data,” Evans told lawmakers.

Evans, who now serves as ERIC’s immediate past chair, urged the legislature to remain in the partnership, arguing that elections officials need more tools to verify voter accuracy, not fewer.

“If we get out of ERIC, then there will be some data that we lose access to, and there’s not a great way to be able to ensure that we continue to get all of that data,” he said in an interview. “Even though some of our neighbors may have gotten out of ERIC, we’re still getting valuable data because people move from Georgia to all over the country.” 

Proponents of software like EagleAI, which uses publicly available data to help private citizens submit mass voter challenges to local elections offices, have billed EagleAI as a potential replacement for ERIC. But Evans disputed claims from conservative activists that programs like EagleAI could be a viable alternative.

“They’re using the things that we already have access to, and that we’re already doing,” Evans said of EagleAI. “There wouldn’t be any kind of value added from going out and using a resource like that.”

The special elections committee’s chair, state Rep. Tim Fleming, a Covington Republican who has launched a bid for secretary of state, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.