EXCLUSIVE: Why DHS Is Targeting the Left's Vote-Mining Machine

A new Homeland Security investigation relies on Restoration News' original reporting to expose the Left's get-out-the-vote machine—and none of it would be possible without your support.

The only time leftists talk about voter rolls is when they're trying to bloat them. If that wasn't already obvious, it is now that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating the nation's top voter roll bloater: the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).

ERIC may be obscure, but don't be fooled—this group is at the heart of the Left's project to mine more than 200 million Americans' private information for new voters, data that feeds the Democrats' get-out-the-vote machine. And now, using Restoration News' groundbreaking research into ERIC, the Trump administration is cracking down for good.

But before launching into what ERIC is and why it matters for national election security, we can't forget how we got here—with the help of patriots like you, who've supported Restoration News since its 2023 launch. Thanks to your steady and generous support for the Restoration News team and our colleagues at Restoration of America (ROA):

That's a potent combination you won't find in Conservative Inc., and we're only getting started building the permanent campaign to change policy forever—because of patriots like you.

The Big Lie They Hoped You Wouldn't Notice

Accurate voter rolls are the key to clean elections. Voter data is the fuel that drives modern electoral campaigns. Keep these two facts in the back of your head, because they explain the election integrity fight better than anything else.

The Constitution gives states primary control over their elections. Federal law also requires states to maintain accurate lists of registered voters. Yet state governments have always struggled to fulfill this mandate because voters regularly leave the state, change their names or addresses, or—inevitably—die. Some people commit felonies and forfeit their voting rights. Others simply fail to vote for years yet remain on the voter rolls. And almost no one moving out of state remembers to unregister in their old state before re-registering in their new state.

That last one sounds counterintuitive because we're used to so many things happening automatically—shouldn't registering to vote in, say, Idaho immediately unregister me in California? The surprising answer is "no." That interstate communication problem is what ERIC was ostensibly created to solve.

In 2012, ERIC spun off from Pew Center on the States—an arm of the left-wing mega-funder Pew Charitable Trusts—as a project to "modernize" the voter registration process. Restoration News traced the project’s early funding to George Soros' Foundation to Promote Open Society, which earmarked $725,000 in 2011 to "expand [its] scope and scale." But a 2010 Pew report created during ERIC's infancy reveals much more.

Pew's forthcoming "common data exchange" would require states to "submit their current [voter registration] lists and motor vehicle data" to a "data center"—what became ERIC—which would "standardize, collate, and match it" with "data such as U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address information, Social Security death index data," "felon data," citizenship status for naturalized Americans, "public assistance agency data," "individual address history," "military data . . . for military members and their families," "state tax data," and "university data [on] student names, ages and addresses."

In other words, ERIC would seek and obtain the private, ultrasensitive data not available to political campaigns—data political operations would kill for—under the guise of helping states remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

By definition, cleaning voter lists means removing ineligible individuals. Yet ERIC require states to attempt to register new voters—a fact to which ERIC's founder, David Becker, has admitted. In 2018, he boasted that ERIC "is the single most effective voter registration drive in the history of the United States." In other words, ERIC is a tool for bloating voter rolls even as it pretends to be a service for de-bloating them—from the organization's bylaws:

When a Member [i.e. state] receives an Eligible but Unregistered Report the Member must act on the report by, at a minimum, initiating contact with all ‘individuals identified in the report deemed potentially eligible by the Member’ for the purpose of providing voter registration information, including the deadlines and requirements for registering as specified in applicable federal or state law.

To put it bluntly, the cleaning is a "may"; the registering is a "shall." That's a raw deal to anyone who's not a Democrat political operative trying to win elections.

And here's the kicker: these member states pay ERIC to hand over their own residents' protected information. If you live in one of ERIC's 28 member states, you're paying to give away your most sensitive personal information to unaccountable partisan groups while also inflating the voter rolls.

What kinds of data does ERIC access? Your most sensitive and tightly controlled personal information, per the group's own bylaws:

ERIC's defenders wave these facts off as so much conspiracy-mongering and coincidence. Yet it's hard to believe the incredible value of this sensitive data was lost on either Pew or Becker, Pew's director of election initiatives and, later, ERIC's first executive director.

Becker is a longtime elections lawyer who once worked for the far-left group People for the American Way, famous for "Borking" Judge Robert Bork in 1987. A former Justice Department colleague once described Becker as an "unethical," "hard-core leftist" who "couldn't stand conservatives." He routinely blasts conservatives as election deniers and domestic terrorists. Today, Becker runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a partisan group heavily funded by Mark Zuckerberg to "fortify" the 2020 election in Democrat vote-rich areas. Becker also frequently lobbies to expand mail-in voting.

In other words, he's a savvy political operator. But you're supposed to believe a group launched, led, and funded by leftists is apolitical.

(For the complete picture on ERIC's origins and operations, read our full report cited by the Department of Homeland Security.)

Finally in the Crosshairs

Restoration News began reporting these facts in early 2023. Now, the Trump administration is taking notice.

On Sept. 2, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin filed an open letter asking newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche to investigate ERIC and CEIR for possibly violating federal law "through states' disclosure of sensitive motor vehicle data for use in identifying and registering individuals who had previously declined to register to vote." The letter follows a September 2025 meeting between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice Department officials on ERIC's possible violations.

From the letter:

Marketed as a voter list maintenance organization, ERIC exposes millions of citizens' sensitive private data to unknown contractors, subcontractors, and agents of ERIC—potentially in violation of the DPPA [Driver's Privacy Protection Act]. In practice, it appears ERIC lobbies states to sign a contract that requires the disclosure of the private data of individuals who were not registered to vote and therefore certainly could not be in need of voter list maintenance. The data fields disclosed include Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers.

Mullin correctly notes that "this category of data regarding potential voters is incredibly valuable to political parties and campaigns." Modern campaigns win or die on how well they’ve microtargeted their voters. Knowing an individual's age, ethnicity, voting history, and more can provide crucial insight into their political leanings.

Yet ERIC's eligible-but-unregistered data has also been used to attempt to register noncitizens to vote—as happened in 2022, when Colorado accidentally mailed voter registration invitations to 30,000 noncitizens. That was ERIC's fault.

"We have serious concerns about the potential for alien registration across other states," Mullin writes.

What about identifying dead voters? That's one of ERIC's "purported benefits," Mullin points out. Yet this year, federal immigration analysts discovered more than 42,000 dead registrants on voter rolls in Georgia, which has been an ERIC member since 2019.

Mullin calls ERIC's use of DMV data "reckless," and he's right. In February 2026, a Washington state resident discovered 550 ERIC eligible-but-unregistered voter registration postcards "mailed to the same commercial address from the Secretary of State."

One mistake is understandable. Two is human. How many errors before we start asking ERIC why it deserves any access to our private information?

Voter Reference Foundation: How It Should Be Done

Contrast that with our colleagues at the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), which publishes www.VoteRef.com in the belief that transparency is paramount to free and fair elections.

"VRF believes election data should be as transparent as possible," VRF Executive Director Joseph Benson told Restoration News, "while ERIC is built around the principle that election data should be shared selectively and controlled through a closed membership structure that avoids public scrutiny."

Amazingly, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already requires most states to make their voter files publicly accessible. Yet Benson points out that everyday people "must wade through complicated record request processes, overcome huge fees, and even face legal barriers"—just to get a pared-down list.

That's why Restoration of America launched VRF in 2022 and has fought in court to guarantee public access to the voter rolls in New Mexico and Massachusetts.

At great expense, VRF purchases voter registration and election data "directly from official state sources using publicly available records request processes" established by federal law, Benson explains. Where VRF can't publish voter data, it documents those limitations "rather than keeping the process clouded in secrecy."

"We do all that work," Benson added, "so that the information that would normally be out of reach is provided to citizens in an easy-to-use format."

Sample page from www.VoteRef.com

Anyone can check their voter registration status in 36 states at www.VoteRef.com—and they should. While they're at it, they should VoteRef their friends, family, and that new babysitter they're considering.

Benson sees a contrast in what he calls "two philosophies of access." While ERIC closes off access to the public and bars journalists from secretive press conferences, VRF believes the more public scrutiny of our election systems the better.

"VRF staff are former election officials, so we have tremendous respect and admiration for the people who work in this space," Benson said. "But we also believe . . . the public shouldn't depend solely on trusting work done behind closed doors. That casts doubt on the hard work it takes to run our elections.

"If our government truly exists to serve the people, then citizens deserve access to the information and processes that govern them," he added. "ERIC's membership aggressively restricts and restrains what information its member states can disclose to the public. It does not appear that ERIC wants the public to know what they do or how they do it."Image credit: Voter Reference Foundation

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