On Thursday, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said that on a recent visit to the ERIC headquarters, he found no one there.
On February 15, 2023, Allen made an unannounced visit to the published address of the headquarters of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) at 1201 Connecticut Ave NW Ste 600 in Washington, DC.
Allen discovered that the location was actually the home of a virtual shared workspace and that no ERIC headquarters existed at the location.
“I was in DC for a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of States and since I was in town, I went to see the ERIC Headquarters,” Allen explained in a press release. “What I found was that there was no ERIC headquarters at that address. There were no employees. There were no servers. There was no ERIC presence of any kind. Instead, I found a virtual office that is rentable by the day. What it was missing was people, servers and any sign of the ERIC team.”
ERIC has published the Connecticut Avenue address as its official address on its website. That information is either dated or factually inaccurate as the location is actually operated by Expansive, a company that offers virtual workspaces across the country and rents space by the day.
“Before I took office, Alabama transmitted the personal information of millions of our citizens to this private organization for the past several years,” Allen continued. “That information is stored on a server somewhere, but we do not know where. There is no ERIC operation at the location they claim is their office. A lot of personal data and taxpayer money has been transferred to ERIC. Where is that data? Where are the employees? Where are the offices? Where are the computers?”
Shortly after his inauguration last month, Allen informed ERIC that the state was withdrawing from participation. Allen made a promise to remove the state from the ERIC system during his campaign last year. Then-Secretary of State John H. Merrill defended ERIC.
“In Alabama, ERIC is used to preserve a clean and accurate voter list and to contact eligible residents who are not registered voters,” Merrill stated. “Each month, we provide ERIC with a voters list and driver’s license data, and we receive information from ERIC for voter list maintenance in return. Monthly, our office receives a list of voter records that potentially need to be removed or inactivated based on deceased records from the Social Security Administration, potential duplicate voter records in Alabama, or voters that have potentially moved out of the state.”
“Since joining the program in 2016, ERIC has identified more than 19,000 voter records of potentially deceased Alabama voters that died in this state or another ERIC member state,” Merrill continued. “98% of those voter records are no longer on the Alabama voter rolls. ERIC identified more than 222,000 voter records of potential cross-state movers from voter lists and driver’s license information obtained from other ERIC member states. 90% of those identified voter records are either no longer on the Alabama voter rolls or have been placed on a path to be removed in accordance with federal law. ERIC identified more than 24,000 voter records of potential duplicate registered voters in which an Alabama voter had duplicate records with potential inaccurate data. ERIC helped us match these voter records, and 95% of those duplicate records are no longer on the Alabama voter rolls.”
Allen served in the Alabama House of Representatives from 2018 to 2022. He served as the Probate Judge of Pike County before his time in the legislature.
Allen said that election security has always been a priority to him, both as the senior elections official in Pike County and as a legislator. Since taking office, he has been meeting with state agencies to establish methods for ensuring that Alabama’s voter lists are clean and accurate.
Allen was elected as Alabama’s 54th Secretary of State in November and was inaugurated in January. Withdrawing Alabama from ERIC was Allen’s first act as Secretary of State. The official withdrawal process takes 90 days, meaning Alabama will be officially withdrawn by mid-April. Allen has announced that he has ceased transmitting any data from Alabama to ERIC.
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