States should adopt the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) voter roll maintenance program and stop using Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck. This effort is driven by a desire to improve election integrity through improved maintenance of voter rolls. We are motivated by nonpartisan principles. Each eligible American should vote once, and only once, and know that it has been counted. No one who is ineligible should get to vote. Election infrastructure should not be managed by partisans.

This is civics, not politics. Advocacy for ERIC and against Crosscheck is simply common sense for those who understand that accurate voter rolls improve Election Day logistics and prevent double voting, and that massive databases of American voter information represent a significant national security risk. Yet, there is a fringe partisan movement that not only rejects this common sense recommendation, but digs in their heels in defense of the inferior system.

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In a recent

opinion piece

in The Hill describing our efforts to promote the Electronic Registration Information Center, pro-Crosscheck Christian Adams relies on the strawman argument that anti-Crosscheck voters are pushing to take voter roll maintenance back to the “obsolete standards from the 1980s.” Yet, he never mentions our support for ERIC, or oddly even its existence.

The Electronic Registration Information Center and Crosscheck both compare voting records across multiple states in an attempt to keep voter rolls up to date. States should discontinue Crosscheck and join ERIC, which has invested in state of the art data security. Crosscheck has demonstrated a careless approach to data security as described in recent ProPublica and Gizmodo articles. Kansas, which funds and administers Crosscheck, could attempt to fix the issues, but why? A better system already exists.

ERIC uses smart data matching, while Crosscheck’s data contains significant numbers of false positives. Seven states so far have stopped using the free program due to its inaccuracy. Of the 27 states that continue to supply data for Crosscheck’s annual data comparison, at least three don’t even attempt to use the results to maintain their voter registration databases. All eight states that use both the Electronic Registration Information Center and Crosscheck acknowledge that the former is the superior system for voter registration list maintenance. ERIC is managed and funded by a bipartisan board of 20 member states, while Crosscheck is run and paid for by Kansas, introducing potential partisanship.

We find it puzzling that pundits such as Adams wax hysterical about the threat of widespread voter fraud and stress the importance of voter roll maintenance, while simultaneously ignoring the most effective tool available for list maintenance. Perhaps this detail in Adams’s column provides the answer to this puzzle: He claims that “more than five million potential duplicate voters” were identified by Crosscheck. Those five million are “potential duplicate voters” in the same sense that every person who walks into a bank is a potential bank robber.

That is the big lie that Crosscheck enables. Crosscheck identifies “potential duplicate voter registrations,” not “potential duplicate voters.” The inflated “five million” statistic is a direct result of Crosscheck’s decision to continue using a discredited matching algorithm, which Crosscheck documentation describes as “when the first names, last names and dates of birth in two records match.” Crosscheck, which captures the last four digits of Social Security number, considers two voters as a “potential duplicate registrant” even if their available last four digits of Social Security numbers do not match.

To understand how intentionally misleading Adams is being here, consider these 2016 Crosscheck statistics provided by Massachusetts, which received more than 181,000 unique potential duplicate voter registrations, or their portion of the “five million.” Narrowing to those who were recorded as voting in two states, we are left with only 88 potential duplicate voters.

Even these 88 potential duplicate voters are likely not cases of actual double voting. Instead, they are often the result of clerical errors by poll workers marking the wrong record. The Massachusetts numbers are in line with analysis we’ve done in over a dozen states. The big lie told by pro-Crosscheck advocates is that Crosscheck’s results are evidence of widespread voter fraud. They take wildly inflated numbers of “potential” duplicate “registrants” and use misrepresentation, dubious mathematical gymnastics, and outright lies to claim they have proof of “massive voter fraud.”

Despite Adams’s assertion that we are well-funded and dishonest, we do this for free and we rely on provable facts. We do it because we believe election integrity is best served by an accurate and effective list maintenance program. We do it because we want all eligible Americans, whether Democrat or Republican or Independent, to have their vote count. A small investment in the Electronic Registration Information Center could provide states much needed assistance to maintain clean voter rolls. We hope that election officials are not fooled by partisan bluster pushing them to keep an inferior, ineffective, wasteful tool whose primary purpose is to feed the “big lie.”

Steve Held is co-chair of the Indivisible Chicago Voter Integrity Task Force.

Anita Parsa is the founder of Voters Against Crosscheck.