"I'm confident we will have the cleanest voter lists that we have ever had," Alabama's Secretary of State Wes Allen said in a press conference today, just eight months after exiting the biased and ineffective Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
https://www.wtvy.com/video/2023/09/18/alabama-secretary-state-wes-allen-unveils-avid-voter-database/
by Patrice Johnson | September 18, 2023
In a sword-swipe to ERIC's jugular vein, Wes Allen announced today that Alabama's voter rolls are showing marked improvement after the state exited the tarnished ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) and has, instead, developed its own system for cleaning and maintaining its voter rolls. The Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID), after a short eight months of development, is now up and running, and it appears to be putting the antiquated and biased ERIC system to shame. The AVID system, as Allen described, better protects the personal identifying information of his state's voters. Plus, AVID has already identified significant failures on ERIC's part, he said, and is proving more cost efficient and effective.
"On January 16th, moments after I was inaugurated as Alabama's Secretary of State, I signed a letter informing the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC, of Alabama's withdrawal," Allen said in a televised press conference. "I promised then that we would develop an Alabama-based solution to manage the integrity of our state's voter lists."
For one, Alabama's new AVID program quickly identified 8,041 voters who had received drivers' licenses from other states while remaining as active voters on Alabama's voter rolls.
Then, AVID, compared the U.S. Postal Services National Change of Address (NCOA) database to the state's voter rolls, and Alabama administrators identified more than 30,000 registrants who had moved to out-of-state addresses.
Allen said Alabama has entered cooperative agreements with five neighboring states. After comparing Alabama's voter rolls with Tennessee's, his team found and removed 8,501 voters who were registered or voted in Tennessee yet were still on Alabama's list of voters--also under the oblivious eyes of ERIC. States that have signed memoranda of understanding with Alabama include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Alabama was one of the first states to exit ERIC. Since then, eight other states have abandoned the floundering database system and reduced its membership to less than half the states. ERIC, a third-party, three employee organization, staffs no headquarters and is opaque from Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests. ERIC is confirmed to share private and personal voter information with undisclosed third-party contractors, subcontractors, and agents, including the far-left organization Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) whose founder, David Becker, also founded ERIC.
Four aspects of AVID include:
A cooperative interagency agreement with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA)
The U.S. Post Office's National Change of Address File (NCOA) database
Cooperative agreements with other states
Analysis of the Social Security Death Index
Local election officials in Alabama are planning to send postcards to those who, based on NCOA data, have moved.
Allen praised local control of elections as integral to maintaining election integrity. "Our voter list integrity and the safety and security of our elections relies on our local officials," he said.
Prong 4 of AVID includes the analysis of the Social Security Death Index, Allen said the state was in the final stages of the accreditation process to use the SS Death Index. Once in effect, names of "deceased registrants will be promptly removed from voter list at the county level."
ERIC, however, rarely recommends the removal of deceased, moved, or non-citizen voters. As the chart below from Verity Vote indicates, ERIC adds voters (in blue) at a rate ten times far faster than it cleans ineligible names (in green) off the rolls:
Allen said that eight months ago he walked into this office and "asked people to be work horses and not show horses." He praised his team whom he said worked "tirelessly to show our commitment to doing what the taxpayers sent us here to do."
"The work we do here is the foundation of our constitutional republic," he emphasized.
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