Michelle Lujan Grisham

Recently, Democrat New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham tweeted out a link to a story from NPR titled, “How the Far Right is Making Voter Fraud Easier,” with an at-a-girl message for New Mexico’s corrupt SOS, Maggie Toulouse Oliver: 

The Tweet garnered 80 retweets – 60 of which were hidden by Twitter – all of which are skeptical of the linked article and the governor’s assertion that the Secretary of State supports a strong voting system and accurate election in New Mexico.

“You’re joking, right?” asked one Twitter user. Another simply stated, “crook.”

One particularly informed Twitter user asked the Governor, “Without ERIC, Dominion couldn’t do what you all need it to do, no?”

The linked audio story from state-sponsored NPR decries a recent exodus of nine states (Texas, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia) from the program called ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center), and naturally, they blame the “far right” and their “conspiracy theories” as the reason ERIC is crashing and burning.

Not to be carried away by the radical left’s emotional name-calling, let’s take just a moment to examine the facts surrounding ERIC: 

Since 2012, ERIC collects member states’ registration data to supposedly collaborate with other states to clean voter rolls and reduce fraud by cross-checking data across states and alerting states of duplicate registrations.  At its height, ERIC had 31 members.  ERIC charges each of its members a hefty annual fee. New Mexico had its first year’s fee of $75,000 paid for by the leftist Pew Charitable Trust as an enticement to join.

A less-advertised feature of ERIC is that they cross-check data with other sources, such as each state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, to look for people who may be eligible voters but are not registered. Then they send lists of eligible but unregistered voters to the election jurisdictions, who then send out mailers at taxpayers’ expense to those people inviting them to register to vote.

An obvious problem with using DMV data to try to find new voters is that non-citizens are often in these databases. ERIC has a strange rule that states, “Under no circumstances shall the members transmit any record indicating an individual is a non-citizen of the U.S.” So, ERIC wants DMV data, but they don’t want the data to indicate which people are citizens and which are not as they compile their lists of potentially eligible voters. 

Can we trust our election officials to filter the lists they get from ERIC so that they only solicit people to register to vote who are citizens? Apparently not. The SOS of Colorado was caught sending invitations to register to vote to 30,000 non-citizens. She claimed the mistake occurred because of a “database glitch,” but that “database glitch” may very well have occurred because of ERIC and its process of identifying adults over the age of 18 in each state. 

What has become clear in the last few years as citizens across the country have investigated the accuracy of their voter rolls by door-to-door canvassing is that ERIC has not “cleaned” the voter rolls in any state where it is present. The voter rolls in every ERIC state have only grown since they joined ERIC, and the data is a mess. 

The Otero County Audit conducted last year in New Mexico included a random survey of over 2,000 residences and found that 30 percent of those residences had people registered who were not actually living at those addresses – and 40 percent of those cast ballots in the 2020 election.  The canvass found a German man who was surprised he was being surveyed as he had never registered to vote, knowing he was not eligible as a non-citizen. How did he end up on the rolls? Did it have anything to do with ERIC? Our SOS has expressed no interest in finding out.

If ERIC isn’t really cleaning voter rolls or keeping them accurate, what are they doing? To answer that question – it’s necessary to investigate the origins of this shady program:

ERIC was founded by a Democrat election attorney named David Becker. The initial grant to create ERIC was provided by none other than George Soros’ ultra-radical Open Society Foundation. After Becker had gotten ERIC on its feet, he established another leftist non-profit called the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) in 2016. 

A researcher named Peter Bernegger discovered in April 2023 that ERIC was passing voter information directly to its sister non-profit, CEIR. CEIR works with another company called Catalist, which claims it “compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across 50 states and the District of Columbia.” Essentially, they have the goods on every human in the U.S. over 18. They also say, “Our data and models are continually improved with the data returned to Catalist by our partners and clients. This virtuous circle ensures the national file is more accurate and more powerful for our clients.” 

And who are Catalist’s clients? According to their website, “Catalist works exclusively with Democratic and progressive organizations that share [their] values.” These include political campaigns, Planned Parenthood, the American Federation of Labor, America Votes, and others.

So, states pay ERIC tens of thousands of dollars per year for the privilege of having data on virtually all their citizens and non-citizens harvested by a Soros-funded organization. This organization then passes along this data to CEIR, which has an intimate relationship with Catalist, which compiles data on essentially every voting-age adult in the country. Catalist, in turn, provides high-quality data exclusively to Democrat politicians and organizations. 

Since we know no state has ended up with cleaner voter rolls after becoming an ERIC member, we can safely assume that the purpose of ERIC and all its incestuous relationships with the radical left is to inflate voter rolls across the country and provide Democrat candidates and organizations an unfair advantage with the data it harvests at the taxpayer’s expense. Citizens of all ERIC states should be outraged that their election officials are participating in this obviously biased scheme to provide an unfair advantage to one party. 

So why would Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse-Oliver join NPR to defend the indefensible? Maybe because, like ERIC, they are both sponsored by George Soros and are staunch advocates of everything the radical left wants to do to unfairly tip the political landscape in their favor to enact its radical policies. 

The data cataloging the political donations made directly by George Soros include only about 165 officeholders or candidates in the last 13 years. Maggie Toulouse Oliver and Michelle Lujan Grisham were both recipients on this exclusive list. 

Contrary to the Governor’s Tweet and attempt to shield the Secretary of State from justified criticism – ERIC does not exist to keep elections free and fair. It doesn’t even do what it advertises. Rather, as all 80 people who responded to the Tweet have figured out – the real reason for the existence of ERIC is to keep the voter rolls as large as possible. That way, Democrats like Grisham and Oliver have plenty of available votes to work with throughout the Election Season to ensure they maintain control over the serfs.

Opinions expressed by Piñon Post contributors do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of the publication or its editorial staff. Submit an op-ed to the Piñon Post at news@pinonpost.com.