Imagine being a Republican governor and allowing a system created by a hyper-partisan Democrat to manage your state’s voter rolls. No one — especially not in today’s deeply suspect voting environment — could be that stupid, right?

Wrong.

As The Federalist’s Victoria Marshall reports, “A prominent voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia has politically compromised ties, according to a new report by independent research group Verity Vote.”

What could go wrong, huh? Especially in states like Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Notice the inclusion of three particular states within the above list: Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. And recall that the 2020 presidential election was decided by a combined razor-thin 43,000 votes in those three states. Notice, also, the inclusion of Michigan and Pennsylvania in that last — two nominally blue states that Donald Trump flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2016 but that went narrowly and controversially back into the Democrat column in 2020. Beyond that, the other states on the list range from narrowly blue to solidly red, with many of them swing states.

Now let’s consider ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 by David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts. ERIC was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls and is supposed to be run by the member states themselves. But public records show that Democrat operatives are working overtime under the cover of this deeply embedded effort to drive Democrat voter turnout.

“ERIC was allegedly established to help states make voter rolls more accurate,” notes Verity Vote, an election-integrity organization. “The primary effect of ERIC is to grow the voter rolls by converting eligible-but-unregistered (EBU) persons into registered voters. States divulge to ERIC personally identifying information of unregistered residents, including people who have declined to register for privacy reasons. FOIAs reveal that ERIC is sharing EBU records with [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg-funded CEIR [Center for Election Integrity and Research].”

Further, says Verity Vote: “Becker has behaved as a partisan-progressive. His bias was exposed in a probe of ethics violations while [he was] at the [Department of Justice]; he worked as the Director of a far-left organization called People for the American Way and then went to work for Pew. After founding and running ERIC for several years, Becker claims that he stepped away from his role at ERIC,” but “FOIA records show that Becker is still involved in ERIC operations and continues to direct and delegate tasks involving ERIC.”

What more do we know about Becker’s partisanship? As Marshal reports:

While at the DOJ, Becker became the subject of an ethics complaint after he contacted Boston and offered his help in defeating a lawsuit made against the city by his employer for voting infractions. According to Hans von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the time, Becker “was supposed to be nonpartisan, but his emails uncovered in the Boston investigation revealed nasty, disparaging remarks about Republicans. Very unethical and unprofessional.”

After his stint at the DOJ and People for the American Way, Becker became the director of election initiatives at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he organized the creation of ERIC in 2012. Though Becker officially left ERIC in 2016, public records show he has continued to play a strong role in the organization, coordinating with state officials on ERIC-related activities and even running ERIC meetings. Documentation of that role is provided in Verity’s report. This is in violation of ERIC’s bylaws as Becker is a “non-voting board member” of ERIC and should not have the power to direct projects.

What makes the ERIC system so destructive to voting integrity, though, is that it doesn’t manage voter rolls in the way we’d normally expect it to. That is, it doesn’t tighten voter rolls so much as it inflates them. Indeed, while ERIC was responsible for the purging of just three million ineligible voters from the nation’s rolls in 2020, the system identified 17 million new voters. And you can be sure that that trove of new voters didn’t come from rural areas or the evenly divided suburbs; it came from urban areas like Atlanta and Detroit and Milwaukee and Phoenix.

As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson reports, “The purpose of ERIC by now is clear: It’s not about cleaning voter rolls but identifying and registering likely Democrat voters.” And, again, 31 states are using it.

The ERIC system has flown under the radar until now largely by design. How so? Its membership agreement prevents member states from disclosing any information associated with ERIC or any related registration or maintenance activities. As the full report from Verity Vote notes, this has created a veil of secrecy around ERIC’s operations and a lack of transparency is a violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which specifically requires states to make these activities public.

Recently, we wrote that one of the many infuriating anomalies about the 2020 presidential election is that Basement Joe “81 Million Votes” Biden won a smaller percentage of counties than any winning president ever, and yet he got more population-adjusted votes than even rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008.

In fact, Biden won just 16.7% of counties in 2020, which shattered the previous record low of 22% set by Obama in 2012, which broke the previous record low of 28% also set by Obama in 2008. So, in 2020, Donald Trump won 2,547 counties to Joe Biden’s 507, and he hauled in a whopping 13 million more votes than he did in 2016, and yet he lost the election by seven million or so votes.

Now we’re learning just how Joe Biden was able to do it — and how the Democrats are planning to do it again in 2024 if Republicans nationwide don’t wake up.