ERIC Part 4: A Response to the Panicked Media Attacks

By Jim Hoft
Published February 14, 2022 at 8:00am

Numerous States have given private and personal information about their residents to ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center), which now has 350 million records on us. It includes all your voter data, Motor Vehicle Department info, and possibly court and vital records too. Media outlets recently attacked TGP about our ERIC investigation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). They included personal attacks again about Jim Hoft, TGP, and others.

Previously:

** ERIC Part 1: Who’s “Cleaning” Our Voter Rolls? ERIC Now in 31 States
** ERIC Part 2: Largest U.S. Counties Removed ZERO to TWO Ineligible Voters
** ERIC Part 3: The Founding of the Nation’s Largest Voter Roll Clean-up Operation

As usual, they make no mention of the concerns people have about ERIC. So let’s cover some of those concerns.

TRENDING: ERIC Part 4: A Response to the Panicked Media Attacks

1. ERIC is just a tiny 3 employee non-profit. Why are they granted regular access to the detailed and private data of residents in 2/3rds of our States? It’s 350 million records.
2. The lead organizer behind ERIC in 2011 was David Becker, formerly from the DOJ and Pew. His career is filled with events and projects that help Democrats and purposely hurt Republicans. His DOJ ethics probe found that he despises conservatives (see Part 3). Why would anyone believe he designed ERIC to be fair for Republicans? An honest bipartisan non-profit would ban Becker from any involvement? But ERIC provides him a Board seat and operates as their spokesperson. This includes his recent attacks against The Gateway Pundit.
3. ERIC is supposed to help clean voter rolls. Yet in 2020, Judicial Watch found 8 states where the average registration for the entire State exceeded 100% (Part 3). These are the worst of the worst voter rolls, and 7 of these 8 States are ERIC members. Colorado, a founding ERIC member, had 40 out of 64 counties exceeding 100%, one with 158%. Why do ERIC members have such dirty voter rolls (Part 2)?
4. Top leadership positions in ERIC are always filled with left-leaning liberals. Some have worked for or been associated with Soros-funded groups. Why won’t ERIC install conservatives in the top positions? Let conservatives control the levers of power for once.
5. Election jurisdictions have laws and rules that force transparency, access to data, audits, dual supervision, and so on. ERIC has virtually the same data, yet it provides no transparency at all. Why is ERIC so secretive? Their 3 page FAQ document was just created, about 2 weeks after TGP articles were first published.
6. Why is my State outsourcing the cleaning of voter rolls to a 3rd party? Why can’t my State’s election department, with all their expertise, full-time employees, and dedicated IT staff, clean the voter rolls themselves?
7. ERIC founders and its leadership has always been hard leftists. How do we know the database or election analytics aren’t being provided, in one way or another, to Democrat operatives?

It’s no secret the original and continued goal of ERIC is to fill State systems with new voter registrations. In the beginning, it was called UVR (Upgrading Voter Registration). Colorado is a 10-year user of ERIC and a good example of how things have played out. Almost every CO county now has more registered voters than residents eligible to vote (see image). But Americans want ERIC members to focus on cleaning their voter rolls, not conducting voter registration drives. In 2016 ERIC knew of 25.2 million potentially eligible voters who were not registered. This is priceless data especially if you’re trying to swing an election. To nefarious actors, every one of these represents an opportunity to generate a legitimate blank ballot.

ERIC secures the transfer of files to their FTP server. It’s their place for States to drop off and pick up files, like Dropbox. Their short technical document is so generic it doesn’t even mention the FTP process. What’s also unmentioned is a database. In fact, Executive Director Shane Hamlin said “raw data is never stored in a central location”. All the voter and MVD data, USPS data, and Social Security records must be analyzed in order to find deaths, moved voters, duplicates, and so. This is where technology partner Senzing steps in.

ERIC hired IBM and their brilliant scientist, Jeff Jonas, to build out their voter data matching system. Jonas founded Senzing in 2016, a spinoff from previous IBM G2 software. Senzing has become a very complex software system (AI) using algorithms and a relational database (MySQL, SQLite, DB2) to analyze data. Companies hire Senzing to process data in order to obtain analytical or predictive insight. They’ve analyzed numerous sectors of society including maritime shipping lanes, money laundering, even casino-based card counting. Senzing says none of your private data actually flows to Senzing. However, this doesn’t mean the data can’t be redirected to other databases, as some patents suggest.

Here are a few questions to ask Senzing:

1. Other than MVD and voter data, what other state data have they collected (felons, vital records, etc.)?
2. Is any prediction-based election analytics or other election insight being derived from the ERIC data? Who does Senzing share this insight with?
3. Who at Senzing can access the ERIC election database and those 350 million records?
4. Are the claimed Senzing “Tamper Resistant Audit Logs” being used within the ERIC data center? If yes, can the logs be provided to concerned SOS members? If not in place, can these type logs be implemented immediately?
5. Has any geospatial, social media, credit card, or other types of data or metadata been merged with the ERIC data?

People just want transparency, especially when it comes to elections. But some Secretary’s of State claim they can’t release the ERIC maintenance lists. Congress added the Public Disclosure Provision into the 1993 NVRA specifically so list maintenance is be provided to the public. But ERIC members merge public voter records and some private MVD data together, then say it’s all private. They say they can’t release the lists because it would violate the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA). But they comingled it in the first place. They need to “unmingled” and remove MVD data and release the lists. Without visibility of voter list maintenance, ERIC could be targeting only Democrats for voter registration in those 31 States.

The ERIC IRS 2020 filing (pg. 34) explains Directors are to complete a “Conflict of Interest” disclosure form annually. They are also to follow ERIC’s conflict of interest policy. Although the Directors are listed on pages 14-17, these are basically token positions, one awarded to each State that joins ERIC. Why not have everyone involved with ERIC file conflict disclosures? This would include the Executive Director, Chairman, System Engineer, even Senzing employees who access ERIC’s system. There are 34 seats on the Board, 7 are on the Executive Committee.

And why is ERIC so defensive to our reporting and questions?  What are they so afraid of?

TGP recently reported Jordan Fuchs as a possible RINO/ Democrat. She’s the Deputy Secretary Of State in Georgia. She is one of the 27 Directors at ERIC. In 2021 the President of the United States was secretly recorded during a call with Georgia election investigator Frances Watson. Fuchs immediately contacted the Washington Post and provided quotes from Trump that were manufactured out of thin air. After the story broke internationally, her SOS office said the audio recording was not available. Two months later, officials located the recording in a trash folder of Watson’s device. The Wall Street Journal‘s full transcript of the audio exonerated President Trump. The WashPost published retraction named Fuchs as their anonymous source that lied. So Fuchs lied about a sitting President to get him indicted or impeached. How did someone this unethical pass ERIC’s “Conflict of Interest” review? Why would she have a seat on the Board?

Also, a real bipartisan organization that is honestly fighting election fraud would not tell a Presidential Commission on voter fraud to piss off. But that’s exactly what ERIC’s Becker and Hamlin did. They refused to cooperate. Trump launched his Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to root out voter fraud. Kris Kobach, who co-chaired the Commission with Pence, reached out to States and ERIC. Kobach was fact-finding and looking for publicly available voter data. Because ERIC had just spent 5 years building and refining their system, they were in a perfect position to help. They could have asked for a grant, then shared best practices, address privacy issues, technology barriers, data matching tech, and so on. Instead, Hamlin and David Becker ran to the media to ridicule the Commission’s efforts.

Hamlin could have referred Kobach and the Commission to Senzing and helped them build out another voter scrubbing system. Or ERIC could have offered up their system as the repository for the Commission’s data. They probably would have added new members too. But according to NBC News “the Commission’s effort was especially galling to Hamlin”. He was annoyed the 30 day old Commission didn’t have proper agreements, privacy practices, or security to his liking. The same things that took ERIC 3 years to build were not yet in place. ERIC had a chance to help the White House, but refused, then ridiculed it. This speaks volumes about their organization and their patriotism.

In a 2017 interview, Hamlin said “There have been no major instances of any unauthorized disclosure of voter info since ERIC was founded”. That’s the craftiest disclosure you will probably ever read. Note key words “major instances” and “unauthorized disclosure”. It allows ERIC to define the scope of any breach by their own standards. For instance, if data was only stolen from 25 or fewer States, then it’s not considered a “major instance”. What if they recognize it as an “unauthorized disclosure” only if the stolen data is released publicly? Members States should get clarification on any and all “successful attacks” that have happened to ERIC in the past, and avoid word games.