Letter: Voter monitoring system raises questions

To the Editor:

I keep reading about citizens being labeled as conspiracy theorists when they reject programs such as ERIC. ERIC stands for Election Registration Information Center. ERIC is a state-run voter monitoring system that submits voter rolls for review of voter information and audits state voter rolls for errors.

There are valid reasons why some oppose ERIC. When Florida tried to back reforms to increase protections for voters data privacy, ERIC refused to provide those protections. Florida, along with five other states, left ERIC complaining that the group does not protect data privacy enough.

In addition, there are well-founded reasons why conservatives say ERIC is a liberal plot to inflate voter rolls and allow improper use of public data to benefit the Democratic Party. It has been revealed that ERIC was founded by state election officials with financial assistance from the Pew Foundation. Pew is a research center that conducts public opinion polls and was recently led by David Becker, the former director of the left-of-center People for The American Way. Also, ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, and as we all know, two-thirds of teachers union members are Democrats.

To validate conservatives’ skepticism, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft wrote that “ERIC focuses on adding names to voters rolls by requiring a solicitation to individuals who already had an opportunity to register to vote and made the conscious decision not to be registered.”

I am convinced that while ERIC is efficiently tracking and storing public data that they are at the same time manipulating that data to benefit the political party that they most align with – the Democratic Party.

Charles Danyus

Round Lake Beach