Texas Legislative Update for Elections
With time running out in the legislative session for bills to be heard in committee, the House Elections Committee scheduled 19 bills for a hearing last Thursday. Those bills covered a broad range of topics from creating a new civil penalty for vote harvesting, to requiring the Attorney General to review ballot proposition language, to bills that would remove voters from the rolls. The bill that garnered by far the most testimony in House Elections was HB 2809, which would withdraw Texas from the Electronic Registration Information Center (known as ERIC). You can read more about ERIC and what was discussed at the hearing through the link below, and you can read our testimony against the bill here.
In the Senate, there were only a handful of bills heard by the committee last Monday, which hopefully indicates that the Senate has revealed all the bills they plan to work on this session. At the Senate State Affairs Committee hearing last Monday, only a few bills were heard, including one that would allow a neighboring county to prosecute election law violations. But the biggest news coming out of the Senate last week was their vote to end countywide polling on Election Day, SB 990. Please be sure to use our Take Action Center to send your elected officials an email opposing this legislation.
House Hears Bill that Would Withdraw the State from ERIC
Last Thursday, the House Elections Committee held a public hearing for HB 2809, which would withdraw Texas from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC consists of a bipartisan coalition of 34 states that have agreed to securely share voter registration data with one another in order to clean up the voter rolls. This crosscheck program is able to identify voters who have moved to other states, voters who move within the state, voters who have recently died, and voters who may have voted twice in another state. Participating states are also required to send postcards to eligible but unregistered voters that contain information on how to register to vote within your state. Texas only recently joined ERIC in March of 2020.
In recent months, several conservative states have announced their plans to withdraw from ERIC, citing a myriad of concerns about the program. Since HB 2809 appears to be setting the stage for Texas to become the next state to withdraw, ERIC's Executive Director, Shane Hamlin, traveled to Texas to provide testimony at last week's hearing. He was able to provide some clarity about the organization's operations and addressed some of the unsubstantiated claims that have been circulating in the press. He reported that the internal conflicts on the organization's board have been rectified, and that former members who were serving in an advisory capacity were asked to leave. He reassured the committee that voters' personal data is transmitted to ERIC in an encrypted format, and that the organization's servers are in fact located in the U.S. He also clarified that ERIC's seed funding was obtained from the PEW Charitable Trust, and no partisan funders were behind those funds. Current funding comes solely from the participating states.
A look at the national numbers for ERIC for the calendar year 2022 shows how effective it is at cleaning up our nation's voter rolls:
- ERIC was able to identify 2.4 million people who moved between participating states — allowing them to be removed from one state's rolls and invited to register in their new state.
- It identified 7.3 million people that moved within participating states, thus allowing them to preserve their registration at their new address and end their registration at their old one.
- 200,000 in-state duplicates were removed, and
- 65K deceased voters were identified and removed from the rolls.
These are real numbers, and they prove that the lists are up to date and secure. Which begs the question, why are states wanting to leave this system?
Through the League's Action Alert Center, more than 6,500 Texans have sent a letter to the Senate State Affairs Committee opposing SB 1070. We have updated the Action Alert to include the House bill companion, so please be sure to use our Take Action Center to contact your elected officials one more time!
To learn more about ERIC, please click here to check out this amazing blog post written by members of the LWVUS Advocacy Team and featured on Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog site.