(The Center Square) – When the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office removed 477,000 ineligible voters from the rolls, 267,000 were identified through the Electronic Registration Information Center.
Commonly known as ERIC, the system is one tool the secretary of state’s office uses to maintain its voter database. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are part of the system created in 2012 by seven states.
Nine states left ERIC since the 2020 election, saying the nonprofit was a voter registration tool instead of a fraud prevention tool. ERIC is overseen by a board with election officials from its member states.
Some Georgia Republicans are pushing for the Peach State to drop ERIC. Rep. Martin Momtahan, R-Dallas, introduced a bill during the 2025 legislative session that would force Georgia out of the organization.
The bill failed, but ERIC has been a central topic of a House panel studying the state’s election process.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced in May 2019 that Georgia was joining ERIC, calling it a “tremendous step forward for the integrity of Georgia’s voter rolls.
“We’ve seen first-hand the impact of the quality of data that ERIC provides,” Blake Evans, elections director for the secretary of state’s office, said in an interview with The Center Square. “They have a very secure process that they follow. All the data gets hashed. The states that are a part of ERIC, none of them get the sensitive data like Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers from other states because it all gets hashed before it ever gets there.”
In the 2022 general election, through the state’s membership with ERIC, Evans said that the secretary of state’s office sent 17 cases of alleged double voting to local district attorneys. More than 3.9 million Georgians voted in the 2022 election. The numbers for the 2024 general election are expected in the next couple of months, according to Evans.
Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, was grilled by Momtahan during a recent meeting of the House Blue Ribbon Committee on Election Procedures. Hamlin told the committee that ERIC has a Washington, D.C., mailing address. The data is kept in a secure location that stores data for other industries such as banks and health care organizations. ERIC’s employees access the data remotely through a virtual private network using their login credentials.
“I can only get into my Gmail account if I have the credentials to get into it, and it’s still from my home network,” Momtahan said.
“It’s not exactly the same,” Hamlin said.
ERIC officials are prohibited from accessing the network from public wifi and cannot log on if they are out of the country, Hamlin said.
Georgia pays just over $107,000 for its ERIC membership, Evans said. ERIC provides information from the United States Postal Service about changes of address and, known as NOCA, and the Social Security death master file. ERIC is just one tool the secretary of state’s office uses for voter list maintenance, he said.
“So if you take ERIC away, we still have all of our other list maintenance processes that we follow and we would have to go out and get and get another NCOA vendor, we would have to go out and get access ourselves to the Social Security death master file,” Evans said. “Our stance is we want to continue to get all the data that we possibly can to continue having the cleanest roles and the most robust voter list maintenance program in the country.”
The committee will meet again on Oct. 15 and will talk about the National Voter Registration Act, according to its agenda. The committee is chaired by Rep. Tim Fleming, R-Covington, who is running for secretary of state.
