When Florida followed many other states in joining a respected multi-state national voter integrity compact in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis called it “the right thing to do.”
It certainly was — and it was long overdue, too.
But now, Florida has abruptly pulled out of the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC, and it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
It’s another example of how DeSantis puts his presidential political ambitions ahead of his state’s priorities, and puts the lie to his frequent claim that he’s committed to the highest standards of election integrity.
The first suspicious sign of this abrupt about-face was the fact that neither DeSantis nor his chief elections official, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, told Florida’s 67 county election supervisors that the state was severing ties with ERIC.
The supervisors, including Broward’s Joe Scott and Wendy Sartory Link in Palm Beach County, and their colleagues across the state, were Florida’s biggest champions of ERIC, because it made it much easier to catch cases of voters registered in two or more states.
The county supervisors had made continued membership in ERIC one of their top priorities in the 2023 session as a way to keep scrubbing the voter rolls in Florida.
They were blindsided by DeSantis’ decision. After all, Byrd included ERIC’s membership fee in his preliminary budget proposal for next year and even made a passing reference to the state’s partnership with ERIC in testimony before a House committee several weeks ago. For those reasons, it looks like Byrd was blindsided by the exit from ERIC, too.
A big blast from Georgia
If DeSantis is to have any chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, he has to have credibility with the pro-Trump election-deniers, who are among the loudest voices in the GOP. That’s what ending Florida’s membership in ERIC is really about.
Florida’s sudden snub of ERIC brought a swift denunciation from Georgia’s top elections official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who’s very familiar to many Floridians for his strong resistance to former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the Georgia election results.
“Any state that prioritizes politics over best practices and opts out of ERIC ahead of next year’s presidential election actually runs the risk of having outdated voter rolls,” Raffensberger told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “If states are interested in strengthening elections, withdrawing from ERIC does just the opposite.”
Raffensberger, who’s a Republican, is especially frustrated because there’s so much cross-migration between his state and Florida. Because of DeSantis’ twisted priorities, Georgia’s voter rolls will be less accurate.
Florida is not alone. Two other deep red states, Missouri and West Virginia, recently quit ERIC, and conspiracy theorists now want Texas to jump ship, too. They are making baseless accusations that ERIC is funded by the billionaire George Soros.
But Florida’s status as a national leader in in- and out-migration made it ERIC’s biggest catch, and it took years of effort by the state’s elections professionals.
In explaining Florida’s reversal, Byrd claimed ERIC denied the state’s requests for changes, such as prohibiting non-voting members from serving on ERIC’s board. One such non-voting member is David Becker, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and a respected voting expert who has been a consistent critic of election deniers.
Scott’s stubbornness
Throughout the eight-year tenure of former Gov. Rick Scott, the state stubbornly refused to join ERIC, despite steady pleas from election supervisors, as one red state after another joined the organization.
To DeSantis’ credit, Florida finally joined ERIC in August 2019, several weeks after a Sun Sentinel editorial that carried the headline: “Florida leaders talk about fighting election fraud, then do nothing.”
The annual membership in ERIC cost Florida $575,000 a year, and it came with one big catch: In even-numbered years, member states were required to pay for a statewide mailing to the many adults who were able to vote but do not, the population known as EBUs — for eligible but unregistered.
Florida never kept its promise to send a statewide mailing to the many EBUs in Florida, many of whom live in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
An effective mailing likely would have ensured that many more young people and people of color would have joined the voter rolls in Florida, and that’s one thing that DeSantis and other Republican politicians in Florida don’t want.
____
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
