David Becker, an election law advocate who helped create the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), is vacating his position on its board as a flurry of far-right conspiracy theories about the voter roll maintenance program prompted a handful of red states to withdraw from its services.
Becker made the right move in the face of such lunacy. I hope the nuts will now settle down.
Is it crazy to think that a few of these R officials are looking for an opportunity to screw around with the voter rolls themselves?
Remember when Gateway Pundit was considered an “internet pioneer blogger”?
I think that’s their plan, or they’re too stupid to understand that they are opening themselves up to more voter shenanigans than was possible under ERIC.
If those that really want to rig voting are to have their way ERIC has to go. That’s it. All there is to it.
Starting to think making propaganda for-profit in our society might be a problem.
It would be hard to be more obvious: the only illegal voters ERIC will ever bust in the real world, are Republicans voting twice at their sisters’ houses and vacation properties.
I wish he hadn’t stepped down. The loony fascist right claims another scalp.
And will go so far as to claim that his stepping down PROVES he was a liberal partisan. Sigh…
Like the destruction of ACORN and the firing of Shirley Sherrod and innumerable other instances of people’s lives being ruined by misinformation, this is just another example of the incredible danger of so-called free speech. Somehow we have confused the notion of free speech with unfettered untrue hate propaganda that amounts to little more than stochastic terrorism. When we get hit with all of the deep fake videos as 2024 comes nearer, it will be interesting to see if that is also considered free speech because I don’t see the difference.
Dismembering ERIC is tragic. It’s a nonpartisan information-sharing resource that has served to reduce the chances of so-called voter fraud.
Fascism is inevitable. However, there were constraints on free speech that have been squashed to just this end. The Zombie Christian Party can’t go on without the absolute faith of their followers - part of the whole cult gag - and lying to them has been essential since the beginning.
It will be the test of our modernity if we can slip it. I’m betting not. The Right put the Unions to death when they sold the public utilities. They cut the throat of their opposition then, and globalization has just butchered what was left.
What we have in the West is a return to the days of Kings in all but the delivery. Worth mentioning that the Religious Right have captured the highest court in the land and want to reinterpret the founding documents.
Reformation 2: Back to the Dark Ages.
Not explained in the article, or maybe I missed it, is he resigning because he thinks this will somehow appease the lunatics and allow ERIC to be seen as non-partisan (it wont) or is he resigning because he’s sick of the bs and scared for his life?
Yet another example that Republicans don’t run to solve problems because they prefer the problem to the solution.
Another example: immigration.
Despite Republican demagoguery to the contrary, it was the Democratic Party in recent years that has tried to hammer out an immigration reform bill that also dealt with the border.
In 2007, the Democrats had a bill that the Republicans blocked in the Senate. Then in 2013 the Senate Democrats hammered out another bill that included $30 billion for border security and garnered 68 votes — a supermajority. The House Republicans blocked it.
The Republican Party is the party of open borders. By continuing to block reform efforts, they reward their donors in the construction, hospitality and service industries with a supply of cheap labor —and put downward pressure on wages for American workers — while they demagogue and weaponize the issue of “illegals” for partisan political gain.
And by continuing to spread lies about election fraud, Republicans are the main violators of election integrity.
Like x 1000. The hypocrisy around cheap labor/“illegal aliens” is so bad here in AZ it is like living in a shithole multiverse.
What? I remember E.R.I.C. very well. It was an effort, started in the mid-1960s, by the Department of Education and stood for Educational Resources Information Center. It’s mission was to make available to the public, through the new-fangled resource that would become the WWW, or the Internet, all the information that was available about education research and information. I should know, my graduate department in the new field of Information Science was one of its clearinghouses for subject information and inclusion. That was back in the mid 1970s.
It is still up and running. Who is this imposter calling themself ERIC now?; and why haven’t they been sued for copyright infringement? Shame on them!
Is your contribution to be viewed as humorous, or are you trolling?
If he hadn’t stepped down it would have proven the same thing…
Exactly! These “Conservatives” have mastered the art of casting everything as a negative that can never be proven or disproven. And if you were able to, they STILL don’t accept it 
Narrator: the conservatives, unsurprisingly, were not satisfied until every member of the board had been replaced by an election denier.
Somebody needs to state exactly what the issue is with Republican states.
ERIC’s purpose is to make sure elections are conducted fairly and the democratic process.
The issue is that these states do not want fairness or really democracy. What they want is to hold power at all costs. In fact that is there only goal which is why they are withdrawing from ERIC.