UPDATE: Will Desperate Virginia Democrats Get Out the Vote With ERIC?

Fearing their chances in 2024, Democrats try to revive the zombie turnout program

If Virginia Democrats get their way, the Old Dominion could soon be forced back into a partisan voter registration machine, boosting Democrat turnout in the November 2024 election. With an ERIC bill soon headed to his desk, only Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin can save the commonwealth from rejoining.

House Rep. Mark Sickles (D–Franconia) introduced a bill on Jan. 10 (HB 1177) requiring the commonwealth to rejoin the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) after conservative Election Commissioner Susan Beals withdrew last March—this time for good. If that sounds niche, the consequences of rejoining are anything but.

Since we first reported in January, Sickles’ bill narrowly passed from the elections committee on a party-line vote (12–10), the appropriations committee on a party-line vote (12–10), and then the House floor… on a party-line vote (50–48). In the Senate elections committee, the vote was even closer: 8 yeas to 7 nays, again along party lines. With Republicans united against it, Gov. Youngkin’s decision is clear.

Clearly, Democrats are using their new (albeit thin) majorities to ram through a controversial bill no one believes will improve the integrity of Virginia’s election. But, of course, election security was never the point of ERIC.

As Restoration News revealed throughout 2023, ERIC is one of the Left’s most powerful weapons for identifying, registering, and turning out new Democrats at a huge scale in swing states. Yet for over a decade this private, partisan get-out-the-vote machine masqueraded as an innocuous tool for helping states clean voter rolls, while secretly funneling private data on over 200 million Americans to Democrat-aligned political groups.

(RELATED: It’s Time to Set the Record Straight On ERIC’s Lies)

From the bill:

. . . the Commissioner of Elections shall submit an application for the Commonwealth’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, Inc. (ERIC) to its Executive Director. Upon notification of acceptance of Virginia’s admission, the Commissioner shall promptly execute any membership agreement and pay any membership fees required to effect such admission into ERIC. The Commissioner shall thereafter take any steps necessary to preserve Virginia’s status as a member in good standing of ERIC [emphasis added].

Restoration News was the first to show that non-ERIC states have cleaner voter rolls than do ERIC member states—including Virginia. A month after announcing Virginia’s withdrawal, Beals announced that there were 19,000 dead voters on the rolls who somehow went unnoticed by ERIC, the group we’re told was created to expose these errors.

That’s a feature, not a glitch; ERIC was created with funding from the leftist Pew Charitable Trusts to bloat voter rolls, not clean them, helping “progressives” transform America’s electorate to suit their needs. Why else would ERIC force member states to register eligible-but-unregistered individuals at taxpayer expense?

“After a decade of sending Virginia’s voter data to ERIC, the Virginia Department of Elections was wise to sever that relationship,” said Nancy Smith, political director of the conservative group Middle Resolution. “ERIC’s resistance to full disclosure of how millions of bits of voter data has been used and for what purpose speaks to the kind of distrust that voters have about our election system. Was ERIC’s real purpose to clean the voter rolls or to aid Democrats in winning elections? Time and further investigation will tell.”

Democrats’ sophisticated microtargeting techniques—responsible for netting lackluster Joe Biden some 81 million votes in 2020—only work with data acquired from ERIC and filtered through its activist ally, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of 2020’s infamous “Zuck bucks” recipients.

Both groups share a common founder: Democrat election lawyer David Becker, who boasted in 2018 that “[ERIC] is the single most effective voter registration drive in the history of the United States.” Becker later ran a sham “democracy summit” in May 2023 in which progressive elites smeared conservatives as “fascists” and “election deniers” for questioning the questionable 2020 election.

Now Virginia Democrats—who denied ERIC’s partisanship last year—have all but admitted that the machine’s conservative critics were correct, and they’re desperate to bring it back before November. With Democrats narrowly controlling the General Assembly, it’s up to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin to halt the scheme in its tracks.

(READ MORE: ERIC—The Best Data Money Can’t Buy)