Election experts’ frustration at anti-voter fraud resistance justified

Republicans in Tallahassee talk a good game about the need to combat election fraud. But when they have a real chance to do something about it, they do nothing.

This glaring inconsistency breeds resentment and suspicion among locallyelected supervisors of election across Florida, the people who work to make the voter rolls as clean as possible.

For years, supervisors have urged the state to join a nationwide compact with 26 other states and the District of Columbia to clean up the voter roll and reduce the risk of fraud. The nonprofit group is ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. States would securely share voter databases to eliminate duplicate registrations and more closely track people moving between counties or who remain registered after dying.

During former Gov. Rick Scott’s tenure, state officials ignored pleas that the state join the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. In 2018, the Legislature gave the state approval to join the compact, but the frustrating slow-walking grinds on under Gov. Ron DeSantis, and at a statewide elections conference in Daytona Beach on Wednesday, election supervisors let the state have it.

“With Florida having such close elections, and voter fraud obviously being on the minds of many, it’s just very frustrating for us not to have access to that tool,” Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark told a top state elections official.

Other counties chimed in: Lori Edwards in Polk County, Joyce Griffin in Monroe, Paul Lux in Okaloosa and Wendy Sartory Link in Palm Beach, a recent DeSantis appointee.

“Anything we can do to clean up the voter rolls,” Link told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s a voter confidence issue. We need to be telling our voters we’re doing everything we can to protect the integrity of the voting process.”

The state’s convoluted response, from Division of Elections director Maria Matthews, was that a “cost-benefit analysis” is underway to determine whether joining ERIC makes sense.

“I am not sure personally how we’re proceeding with that,” Matthews told a crowd of about 300 elections officials, making it clear the decision on ERIC is being made above her level. “There’s a lot of moving pieces and parts to this.”

That didn’t stop Alabama from joining ERIC. Or Alaska, Connecticut, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. The latest state to join ERIC was Georgia on Wednesday.

Matthews made her remarks minutes before the state released a letter from DeSantis in which he directed state elections officials to make election security a top priority.

“Public faith in our elections is the bedrock of our democracy,” DeSantis wrote.

Away from cameras and microphones, supervisors suspect that the real motive behind the state’s resistance is purely political. Joining the ERIC compact requires building a universe of eligible voters who aren’t registered, and then conducting an annual postcard outreach program to encourage them to register.

An estimated 4 million-plus Floridians fall into this category, enough people to transform the partisan composition of the voter roll even if one-fifth of them become voters. The state would pay for the outreach program. The time is now because federal law prohibits major changes to state voter databases less than 90 days before next year’s presidential election.

“It’s more of the same,” a fed-up Lori Edwards said Wednesday. “I don’t know how year after year, they’re ‘too busy’ to fight voter fraud.”

In a state as diverse as Florida, many of those people, known as EBUs (eligible but unregistered) are sure to be young and members of racial and ethnic minorities, not part of President Trump’s base in America’s biggest battleground state with a long history of excruciatingly close elections.

Is it possible for Florida to keep up with Alabama and Louisiana on election security? It’s put-up-or-shut-up time to join ERIC — or to tell Floridians the real reason why not.