Written by Kat Stansell, an associate of Tom DeWeese

While many “red” states are in the process of resigning from ERIC in the battle against voter fraud, Tallahassee has decided they love it.

ERIC was set up in 2012 by a Soros grant, and sold as a voter roll maintenance system. Instead, it has proven to be an artificial intelligence gathering system and left-wing voter registration program, associated with blatantly inaccurate voter rolls in its member states. As of 2020, 50% if its members had voter rolls well in excess of 100% of the number of all possible citizens of voting age in the state, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

ERIC specializes in creating voter rolls that are statistical impossibilities, and adding millions with questionable credentials to the rolls.

In the case of Florida, the state’s voter rolls were at 101.6% of all possible citizens of voting age. Not something to love, I might think, if concerned by election integrity.

Rick Scott, who was governor before DeSantis, refused to join ERIC because he saw it primarily as a data-gathering system, with no real program for roll maintenance. Nowhere in its bylaws or membership mandates does ERIC give its members a plan or system to clean rolls. Scott was unwilling to turn over all of his citizens’ information to the federal government to be used and stored however the system chose. According to membership regulations, the member states have no access to their own information once turned over to ERIC’s AI data base. DeSantis joined Florida to ERIC in 2020.

Louisiana and Alabama recently withdrew from membership, and several more states are in the process.

As you know, if you have been following this story, election integrity activists led by the Florida Republican Assembly and The People’s Audit, had already discovered thousands of bad addresses and fraudulently voted ballots, before the 2022 midterms, and had proven how this happened. Their findings were reported to Tallahassee.

There had been no response from the governor, even in light of the creation of his highly advertised “Election Crimes” division.

In January 2023, Florida activists presented Tallahassee with more data about the numbers of invalid addresses on the state rolls. Five hundred twenty-one thousand, three hundred sixty bad addresses in total were found in county after county. The ERIC system was questioned. In a meeting with Cord Byrd, the Florida Secretary of State, the citizen volunteers were told – to their faces, with a chuckle – that “Florida loves ERIC;” that they just utilized the system “a little differently.” Further questions were ignored.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that if a state concerned with election integrity is presented with the numbers that were given to the Florida state officials, they would respond with fervent thanks and an immediate task force to correct the problem. After all, DeSantis’s first gubernatorial election in 2018 was only won by the slim margin of 32,463.

State officials had had their chance to address the problem and whistled right past what could be seen as their own “graveyard.”

After all, they loved ERIC.

The patriots from the Florida Republican Assembly and The Peoples’ Audit were stunned. They had uncovered over a half million bad or “undeliverable” addresses on the voter rolls. The facts were well documented, and irrefutable, and the state was ignoring it?

So, “to be fair to Tallahassee,” they ran their own audit this time on the ERIC system itself. What could Tallahassee possibly see to love? After all, ERIC was budged to cost the state $575,000 in 2023 alone.

FRA and The People’s Audit ran a, well, “people’s audit,” using the same systems, BCC Software, as is used by ERIC. ERIC’s membership mandates advocate for and recommend roll maintenance, but provide no methodology by which to do so. No reason to pay good money for the ERIC system, then, if the goal is removing bad address data.

However, Kris Jurski, the creator of The Peoples’ Audit.org, is a computer expert, and has professional expertise in dealing with mailing lists and the USPS. Therefore, he was familiar with CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) the mail coding system used by the USPS, the purpose of which was to eliminate undeliverable addresses (UAA’s) from the mail.

Every year, mail with undeliverable addresses costs the postal service well over a billion dollars, and costs the mass mailers (states, corporations, advertising agencies, etc.), even more than that.

There is also the matter of security from those bad addresses floating around, says postal data analysis group, Firstlogic. As those yellow-stickered UAA’s are returned to senders, they are allowed to stack up in trays in back rooms and storage facilities where anyone can see and utilize them for nefarious purposes. Culling mailing lists seems never to be a top priority among mass mailers. Subsequent mailings then use the same lists, and include all the addresses previously proven invalid, wasting money and making the problem of invalid voters worse.

In Florida, the printers charge the state each time they run mailing lists through the CASS system in order to ensure delivery, thereby tagging those dirty addresses for future use. The UAA’s with their pretty yellow stickers are returned to the SOE’s offices to be stacked away for future use. More money, for the printers, more bad addresses to be used for ballots, it seems. Believe me, I hate to be saying this. Had the election integrity teams not been told about the state’s love for ERIC, I wouldn’t be going there.

Had the ERIC system simply required its member states to CASS certify, the UAA’s would have been removed from the rolls, and the state would save hundreds of thousands of dollars and cleaned up their rolls.

But, then, ERIC would not be producing the cache of millions of dirty addresses for future use; and since the CASS system is not proprietary, ERIC would have nothing in the way of voter roll maintenance – its stated purpose – to offer its members.

As a matter of real fact, FRA and TPA say that no state needs ERIC to do anything. Qualifying all state agencies for the CASS system is all that is required for clean rolls, and that is an easy process.

CASS works by testing the accuracy of postal coding. It removes undeliverable mail, unsortable mail, and mail requiring extra effort by postal workers to make delivery. Most of us know it as the 9-digit zip code. I’ve oversimplified, but you can read more here.

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Backing up a bit, you’ll remember, if you have been following developments on Florida voter fraud before the midterms, the FRA/TPA research had centered on those same undeliverable and ineligible registration addresses. The UAA’s “yellow” labels were at the center of the proof. At that time, Lake County alone had over 22,000 envelopes with glaring yellow stickers which had been returned from a previous mailing, just as described by Firstlogic.

They were stacked in trays in a side room. Instead of marking those addresses as bad, mail-in ballots were sent to them. Magically, those ballots had come back voted AND SIGNED. But this story has already been told. See below.

Back to the present, every county election administrator has been contacted in the last few weeks with the results of their own voter roll analysis. In some, there were a very small amounts of bad addresses discovered. Those are mostly the rural counties with smaller populations who tend to lean conservative, says Jurski.

Many SOE’s were defensive and upset with their results; a few even say that the USPS isn’t accurate enough to use in their area!

( So, no one in Key West orders from Amazon??) Others pushed back, telling the FRA that between the 911 addresses and the actual residence addresses, they had at least one valid address on file for every voter. So, Kris Jurski ran those files too – which caused the number of bad addresses statewide to skyrocket from the original 521,000 to 885,000!

One small rural county was found to have joined CASS themselves to clean their own mailing lists, because the UAA’s on their rolls bothered them. Good for them! A few others apologized for the condition of their lists, but the rest of Florida seems not to care. As you may have imagined, there is no directive on roll culling from the state election director, Maria Matthews, and there is NO state mandate to clean things up.

Well, the elephant is still in the statehouse, and smells bad, like they always do. Kris Jurski says that the police need to be brought in on this. There are clearly crimes of identity theft, and worse, being purposefully committed on an ongoing basis. I would agree. “With what’s going on,” says Kris Jurski in his latest interview on Catching Fire News, “there needs to be some incredible changes made, or people need to lose their jobs.”

Not only has ERIC been proven yet again, to create and encourage voter fraud, but also, a very “red” governor who’s been rising fast on the national scene because of that big red wave in November, has some "splainin'" to do. For one, I’d like to know how they’ve been using ERIC. Could it be for wave-making instead of roll-cleaning?

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Kat Stansell is the Grassroots Outreach Director for the American Policy Center. A native of Cincinnati Ohio, and graduate of Denison University, Kat served the Village of Mettawa, IL, as treasurer and chair of the Planning Commission, where she got a good look at the process of civic vs. corporate interaction. She has been a local activist, working for several candidates and organizations. She has also written for newspapers and websites, and organized events highlighting issues of the day.

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