The Tool we Already Have
The voter rolls in this country are dirty.
That's true, and I want them cleaner than they are. Anybody who tells you those lists are in good shape has not looked at the lists. People move. People die. Almost nobody thinks to tell the board of elections either way.
So the argument I want to have tonight is not about whether the rolls are dirty. It is about what we built to clean them, and what we have been taking apart.
When something goes wrong in a hospital — or when something goes right and nobody is quite sure why — the physicians sit down together for what is called a morbidity and mortality conference. Every serious field has some version of this. The military calls it an after-action review.
Before that conference happens, the identifiers come off the chart. The name goes. The record number goes. The dates get shifted. What is left is the case itself: how the patient presented, the labs, the orders, what was done, when it was done, and what happened.
And here is the thing about sitting in that room. You can learn everything about what went wrong and nothing at all about who it happened to. Nobody in there thinks of it as secrecy. It is just how records move when the point is to fix something.
Elections have a tool built on that exact principle. It is called the Electronic Registration Information Center — ERIC, for short — and the name tells you what it does. It checks registrations.
Seven states built it in 2012, with help from a foundation called The Pew Charitable Trusts. The problem they were solving is the ordinary one. A man moves from the coast to the mountains and registers where he lands. He is now on two sets of rolls and neither state knows it. Another man dies and his name sits there. The states wanted those cleared out without knocking off people who belong on the list.
Here is how it works. Every sixty days each member state sends in its voter file and its motor vehicle records. Before any of it leaves the building, the state runs three things through a coding machine — the driver's license number, the Social Security number, and the date of birth. What comes out is a jumble of letters and numbers. Every member state runs the same machine, so the same birthday always comes out as the same jumble. And the machine only runs one direction. Nobody on the other end can turn the jumble back into a birthday.
Now, I had part of this wrong, and I would rather correct it myself than have somebody correct it for me. I thought the whole record went in coded. It does not. The whole record goes — name, address, the works — and three things inside it get run through that machine first. Those three are the ones that would let somebody become you.
The address has to stay readable, and that is not a loophole. It is the point. When the coded numbers line up across two records and the addresses do not, that mismatch is the signal — that is how a state learns one of its own records may be out of date.
Not every hit works that way. A deceased match needs no address at all; it comes from a man's name and numbers turning up in the Social Security death file. But either way the state needs the name and the address in front of it, because you cannot mail a confirmation notice to a jumble.
The center runs the matching and hands each state a report about that state's own records. Not about anybody else's. No member can see another member's file or another member's reports. And the center is never connected to any state's voter registration system. It cannot add a voter. It cannot remove one. It has no hands.
What it can do is tell a state that one of its records looks like a man who now lives somewhere else, or a man who has died. Then the state goes and finds out which.
Think about what a fingerprint pattern match actually gets you. Ten fingers, loops and whorls and arches. A match does not tell an officer who he has got. It tells him he cannot rule this man out, and that is enough to detain and investigate. Not arrest. Not charge. Investigate.
That is what a hit is here. Enough of it lines up that somebody needs to open the file. Not this person does not belong on the roll. Just: this is one you need to confirm.
With one difference, and it cuts against the tool. A print card can clear a man. This cannot clear anybody. When it comes back quiet, that only means nothing turned up — not that a state's rolls are clean. A quiet report is not a clean bill of health, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
And this is the part people think is a purge, and it is not. Under the National Voter Registration Act, a state cannot take a man off the rolls for moving unless he confirms it in writing, or unless the state sends him a notice and he then fails to answer and fails to vote through two more federal general elections. That is about four years. A match does not remove anybody. A match starts a clock.
Now I have to give you the other side, because leaving it out would make everything else I have told you worth less.
In October of 2017 the center told Wisconsin that three hundred forty-one thousand of its registrants looked like they had moved. Wisconsin mailed every one of them. Six thousand one hundred fifty-three wrote back to say they still lived right where they were registered. The other three hundred thirty-five thousand came off the rolls.
Then people started showing up at the polls. Wisconsin put twelve thousand of them back on by March, on its own, because it decided the data was bad. And researchers who got hold of the poll books found at least nine thousand more who walked in and voted in 2018 at the exact address the state said they had left. And the errors did not fall evenly.
That is twenty-one thousand people, and it is a floor, not a count. The only false movers anybody could find were the ones who both stayed put and voted that year. Everybody else is invisible.
Wisconsin is exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, because it had Election Day registration before that law was written. So it did not have to send a notice and wait out two federal elections. It could take them off, and it did — and then leave every one of them to find out on his own and fix it himself.
That is what happens when a lead gets treated as a finding. And it happened in the one state that was not bound by the clock.
Nine states have left since 2022. Louisiana first. Then Alabama. Then Florida, West Virginia and Missouri on a single day in March of 2023. Then Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Texas.
Take Texas. Texas said it was leaving because the cost was going up as other states walked out. In one six-month stretch in 2022, the center gave Texas information that flagged more than two hundred thousand deceased or duplicate records for county registrars to run down. Six months. The thing was doing the job it was built to do. Texas now pays its own vendors more to get less.
Ohio is a different case, and Ohio was right.
To be a member, a state had to mail voter registration information to people the matching turned up as eligible but not registered. Ohio pushed to change that rule, could not get it changed, and left.
Now, I would send those forms. I would work the mailing myself. But there is a difference between a recommendation and a condition, and it is the whole difference. I came to you for a tool. I did not come to you to be told how to run the job. You do not tell a state that if it wants help finding its dead voters, it first has to run a registration drive. Elections belong to the states.
And here is what happened next. In 2025 the member states amended their own governing documents. That mailing is optional now — a state asks for the report or it does not. Ohio was right about the rule. The rule is gone. Ohio is still out.
Now, what I cannot tell you. I do not know what members are required to do with those reports today, because the organization's own page says that answer is being rewritten after the 2025 changes. I do not know how software updates reach those servers, and I would like to. Employees work remotely with secure access to the data center, so I doubt very much it is an air-gapped system, and I am not going to stand here and tell you it is.
What I can tell you is that the thing has been looked at, repeatedly, by people whose job is to find the holes. An outside security firm in 2020 found strong practices and no critical findings. A formal security audit in 2023. And in 2021, when the center brought in Homeland Security and the federal cybersecurity agency to review its hygiene, neither agency was given access to its servers, its data, or its infrastructure.
So the rolls are dirty. They are. And the tool built to clean them is running today with nine
fewer states in it than it had four years ago. The states that left are paying more to do less.
And one of them left over a rule that no longer exists.
I would like them back in.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
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