# Electronic Registration Information Center ERIC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization founded in 2012 by seven states and governed and funded entirely by the state election offices that choose to join. It is the only interstate voter-list-matching tool of its kind: member states submit voter registration and motor vehicle data, and ERIC returns reports identifying registrants who have moved, died, or appear on more than one state's rolls, plus lists of apparently eligible but unregistered residents that members are required to contact. Its founding rationale was a 2012 Pew study finding roughly one in eight U.S. voter registrations invalid or significantly inaccurate, more than 1.8 million deceased people still listed, and about 2.75 million people registered in more than one state. **Membership is a political act.** ERIC peaked above thirty members before a 2022–23 pressure campaign — driven by claims that the organization was a partisan voter-registration operation — produced a wave of departures. As of May 2026 it has **27 member states plus the District of Columbia**. Virginia, one of the 2012 founders, withdrew in May 2023 and was readmitted on **April 30, 2026** under [[Abigail Spanberger]], by executive order and then by statute — the statute specifically so that a future governor cannot simply leave again. Because ERIC is voluntary and contractual rather than statutory, it is the clearest example of a piece of American election infrastructure that no law requires and any single state official can remove their state from. ## Who drove the exodus The research behind the 2022–23 departures came largely from [[Heather Honey]], a Pennsylvania activist in [[Cleta Mitchell]]'s [[Election Integrity Network]]. Votebeat and Spotlight PA called her 29-page ERIC report the research "with the most success"; it appears to have influenced several member states' decisions to leave. In June 2022 she presented on ERIC to secretaries of state and their staff at a private Washington event hosted by Mitchell. Honey joined DHS as its election-integrity official in 2025. ## See Also - [[State Election Administration Tree]] — where ERIC sits in the structure - [[National Voter Registration Act]] — the list-maintenance duty ERIC helps states meet - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Election Denialism]] - [[Abigail Spanberger]]