State election director suggests voting analysis group opposed by Trump may be too costly for Alaska, but it's not

When the state’s new election director, Carol Beecher, told a senate committee this week that she might withdraw from a national nonprofit effort that tracks voter fraud because of the cost, she might as well have raised a red flag.

Carol Beecher said “she was considering severing ties with a nonprofit that helps maintain voter rolls, after several Republican-led states announced earlier this month their intention to pull out of the effort,” the Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.

She said the state might pull out of the Electronic Registration Information Center because it costs too much.

Beecher, who said she did not know the meaning of the group’s acronym, said there are benefits and drawbacks to ERIC. The main drawback, she said, is that it is expensive, that Alaska is a small state and she doesn’t know if the group provides a good return on the state’s investment and maybe the state can do the work more cheaply. She did not mention and she was not asked what qualifies as “expensive.”

The truth is that membership in ERIC is not at all expensive.

Given all the attention about making sure voter rolls are accurate, the group provides a needed and inexpensive service.

Smaller states pay a lot less than those with bigger populations. The dues range from $26,000 to $116,000, the group says. Alaska pays a good deal less than average.

The Daily News reported that “ERIC fees and dues in recent years have been less than $17,000 annually. Additionally, the state has spent between $10,000 and $24,000 per year on contacting voters by mail once the system identified issues with their registration.”

Since 2016, the ERIC service has helped the state remove 14,000 people from voter rolls who left Alaska and 1,565 who died. “The program has also helped the state identify and contact more than 136,000 individuals who were eligible to vote but not registered between 2016 and 2022,” the Daily News said.

A bit of important background about critics of ERIC from the Washington Post:

“Critics, some of whom have aligned themselves with the false stolen-election narrative of former president Donald Trump, have claimed that the group is actually a left-wing vehicle that shares sensitive voter data with liberal groups, encourages bloated and inaccurate rolls and enables the very fraud it is intended to stamp out. ERIC’s leaders deny these accusations,” the Washington Post reported.

“Now, ERIC’s survival is in jeopardy, with Republican-led states withdrawing, others threatening to do so and heated disputes breaking out among members over how to save the organization.”

The director of ERIC, responding to the spread of misinformation about the group, explained the group’s mission in an open letter posted on its website.

“ERIC is a non-profit membership organization created by state election officials to help improve the accuracy of state voter rolls and register more eligible Americans to vote. This has been our mission since 2012,” wrote Executive Director Shane Hamlin.

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