Key conservative group joins attacks on partnership that improves voter rolls

An influential conservative group that has filed numerous lawsuits to force states to clean up their voter rolls, has joined Donald Trump and other election denial groups in attacking the most robust tool that accurately improves those voter rolls.

Judicial Watch, whose leader Tom Fitton urged Trump in 2020 to claim victory before all the votes were tallied, released a flawed report alleging potential violations of federal law by the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a bipartisan consortium of over two dozen states that exchange voter registration data to ensure election security.

Fitton’s attack on Eric is part of a growing campaign by Trump-allied election denialist groups and Trump to urge member states to leave the consortium, prompting scathing criticism from voting rights advocates and election experts including some GOP officials.

The group’s 10-page error-riddled white paper, which was posted on its website on 9 March, falsely slams Eric as a “syndicate founded by leftists” and charges that Eric has been “far more effective at swelling voter registration rolls than at keeping them clean”.

Danielle Lang, the lead voting rights litigator at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center, told the Guardian that the white paper was badly flawed and “makes claims largely based on supposition, inaccuracies and personal attacks”.

Eric was started in 2012 by seven states, including four led by Republicans, and is the sole data-sharing program for states since there is no clearinghouse for voter registration. The consortium was launched to keep voter registration rolls up to date, thwart possible voter fraud and spur voter registration.

Since last year, seven Republican-led states including Alabama, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, have pulled out of Eric as conservatives and Trump have stepped up attacks on the multi-state consortium.

Trump on 6 March used his social media platform Truth Social to urge GOP-led states to “immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up”.

Fitton did not respond to requests for comment on Judicial Watch’s attacks on Eric.

For Judicial Watch, whose overall revenues soared with help from major rightwing donors during Trump’s presidency from $53m in 2017 to $124m in 2021, the anti-Eric drive comes after years of election fights by Fitton that voting rights advocates say are badly flawed.

Before its current attacks on Eric, Judicial Watch had long alleged bloated voting rolls in states and filed lawsuits, or threatened them, if states didn’t take action.

“Judicial Watch is notorious among both advocates and election officials for its aggressive attempts to force states to purge their rolls based on shoddy and faulty data and methodology,” said Lang. “For example, in 2021, its lawsuit against Pennsylvania election officials was kicked out of court for its reliance on outdated data and its unsupported claim that registration rates were, in its estimation, ‘too high’.”

Lang stressed that Eric “has proven to be the most effective tool for ensuring cleaner and more accurate rolls. If Judicial Watch actually cared about strong list maintenance, it would be Eric’s greatest champion.”

Judicial Watch has racked up some successes with its lawsuits about bloated voting rolls. Ironically perhaps, Kentucky joined Eric as part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought in 2017 by Judicial Watch and the Public Interest Legal Foundation that the state had failed to clean up its voter rolls.

Nonetheless, Eliza Sweren-Becker, voting rights counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian that Judicial Watch had been “trafficking in misrepresentations about voter fraud” for many years.

“The organization has repeatedly used misleading data in lawsuits seeking to compel aggressive voter purges,” she said.

Fitton’s bona fides as a champion of election integrity were badly undercut by revelations last October by the House panel investigating January 6. One hearing included emails from Fitton days before the 2020 election urging Trump aides to tell Trump to declare victory at midnight on election day before all ballots would have been counted in key states.

At the panel hearing, the Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren revealed a memo Fitton wrote on 31 October suggesting that Trump should simply say on election night: “We had an election today, and I won.” On election day, Fitton said he had just spoken to Trump and pushed his plan once more.

Besides Fitton, other well-known Trump allies have blasted Eric. Last month, the America First Policy Institute, which boasts strong links to several former Trump officials, put out a statement from the former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell who runs its “election integrity” program, calling on states to pull out of Eric.

Likewise, lawyer Cleta Mitchell, the senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute who was on Trump’s call in January 2021 in which he pressed Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to just “find 11,780” votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state, “is very opposed to Eric” said a government source familiar with her efforts.

Mitchell hosted a podcast last year that portrayed Eric as “the force behind bloated voter rolls”.

Despite the attacks, some former secretaries of state are strongly defending Eric’s importance in bolstering election security and integrity. “Separating your state from Eric will undoubtedly lead to vulnerabilities that could result in significant election integrity concerns,” the former Alabama secretary of state John Merrill, who left office before the state pulled out of Eric, told the Guardian.

“Based on my work with Eric, it is the best resource around today to ensure election integrity in the area of cross checking dual voter registration and voter participation in the same election cycle,” Merrill added.

Asked about the Judicial Watch white paper, Merrill, a dues-paying member of the group, said: “Tom is very well regarded in conservative circles. But sometimes you can make charges that have not been proven that can damage the credibility of your organization and its mission and can also be dangerous. The White paper includes information that’s yet to be proven.”

As part of the right’s anti-Eric offensive, Fitton and other critics have alleged the consortium has a political bias involving David Becker, who helped spearhead the founding of Eric when he worked on election issues at the Pew Charitable Trusts, an early funder of Eric.

Becker, a former voting rights lawyer at the justice department, strongly denied allegations of political bias.

“Eric is one of the rare bipartisan success stories in the polarized world of elections,” Becker told the Guardian.

In Becker’s eyes, the attacks on Eric fit with the widening election denialist agenda.

“Election deniers want to eliminate these guardrails that protect election security to allow election losers to lie about elections being stolen, and raise more money from those sincerely disappointed by their candidates losing,” he said.

To be sure, Judicial Watch has had success raising big bucks from conservative donors and foundations, as Fitton has risen in the right’s ecosystem. Since 2010, Judicial Watch has roped in six- and seven-figure checks from such top conservative donors as the Schwab Charitable Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust and others, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

Fitton’s influence and entree to big donors got a boost last year when he became president of the powerful and secretive far-right Council for National Policy, which includes hundreds of religious conservatives, wealthy patrons and activists and meets a few times yearly to brainstorm about strategies, goals and operations.

Fitton is also mobilizing Judicial Watch to defend Trump from his 34-count indictment by the Manhattan district attorney involving a scheme to pay $130,000 in hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.

In a Judicial Watch mailing and video on 31 March, Fitton informed his 515,000 YouTube followers that to defend Trump against what he portrayed as a conspiratorial “brazen attempt to rig the 2024 election for Biden and the Democrats”, the group would use various tools including “court actions”.

Fitton’s blitz to back Trump as he fights his indictment seems in keeping with Judicial Watch’s recent drive against Eric.

“Judicial Watch has jumped on the bandwagon of the most recent election denial conspiracy theories and come out against the Electronic Information Registration Center,” Lang of the Campaign Legal Center said. “This is pure politics.”