Utah House votes to remove state from voter roll system before next election

The Utah House voted along party lines on Friday to remove the state from the ERIC voter roll maintenance system after a debate over whether there was an adequate alternative in place.

HB332, Voter Registration Data Amendments, would require the state to end its contract with the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, by July 6, and lists requirements for entering into an agreement with another state or third-party contractor.

Utah became a founding member of ERIC over a decade ago. The nonprofit group was formed to help its two dozen members coordinate voter registration data and update voter rolls to prevent voters from casting ballots in multiple states.

Bill sponsor House Majority Whip Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield, made the case that ERIC has not been effective in removing ineligible voters from Utah rolls or ensuring the safety and proper use of voter data.

“Clean voter rolls are the foundation for secure elections,” Lisonbee said, reading from the state election website. “However, a recent audit revealed numerous issues.”

What did the audit find?

Lisonbee began working on her bill a few years ago as several other Republican-leaning states left ERIC after allegations emerged that the organization was misusing voter data to increase voter registration among likely Democrats.

But following a legislative audit report released in December — which did not mention ERIC — Lisonbee decided to expand the scope of her bill to incorporate a number of other recommendations to clean up Utah voter rolls.

The audit identified 1,400 deceased voters who were still on Utah voter rolls. Of these individuals, 700 likely received ballots and two cast a vote in the November 2023 election.

The legislative audit also highlighted a lack of compliance among some county clerks in conducting post-election audits, ensuring adequate surveillance and maintaining proper ballot controls, which Lisonbee’s bill also attempts to address.

“We have a voter roll maintenance problem in the state of Utah, this bill fixes that problem,” Lisonbee said.

Does Utah have a back up to ERIC?

Before coalescing behind Lisonbee’s bill, multiple Republican lawmakers attempted to insert changes that would require the state to identify a replacement before exiting ERIC.

Rep. Paul Cutler, R-Centerville, who voted against Lisonbee’s bill in committee last week, proposed an amendment that would set preconditions for a multistate voter roll exchange before Utah could cancel its ERIC contract.

“We should establish some level of new agreement before we break the old agreement,” Cutler said. “It holds true to the sponsor’s intent of moving away from ERIC, but makes sure we do this in a smart way.”

The Utah House Democratic Caucus, which unanimously voted against Lisonbee’s bill, expressed concern over sharing sensitive voter data with a private vendor and argued that the recent audit confirmed the effectiveness of Utah’s voter roll management system.

“Eliminating this system would strip clerks of an irreplaceable tool, jeopardizing the integrity of our voter rolls,” the caucus said in a statement. “We remain committed to protecting the integrity of our elections and strongly oppose any legislation that undermines the secure and proven systems that have served Utah voters for years.”

Since 2012, ERIC has identified over 675,000 records for Utah county clerks to review, including over 6,000 deceased individuals on voter rolls and 76 individuals who appeared to vote in multiple states in 2022, according to an April 2024 statement from the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.

Lisonbee responded to Cutler, and a similar proposal from Rep. Melissa Garff Ballard, R-North Salt Lake, by saying that Utah cannot wait for the Lieutenant Governor’s Office to make another agreement since it has resisted doing so until now.

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has said that ERIC is the only system that allows Utah to know who voted in the group’s 23 other member states and Washington, D.C., and to help the elections office spot duplicate or out-of-date records.

However, seven states have recently signed memorandums of understanding with the election officials of Alabama, which formed its own “voter integrity database” in 2023 after leaving the ERIC consortium.

What else does the bill do?

Lisonbee’s bill would require an agreement with a group of states or a contract with a third party to:

• Employ industry standard security measures to protect voter information.
• Utilize advanced data analytics to compare government records.
• Use voter registration data for no other reason than maintaining the accuracy of the database.
• Dispose of data according to an approved retention schedule.

The bill would instruct the Lieutenant Governor’s Office to publish updated voter registration totals on its website multiple times a year, report biannually to the Legislature on its efforts to maintain the accuracy of voter rolls, and ensure that voter rolls are compared to death certificate information 90 days before even-year elections and twice in odd-numbered years.

It would also require the Lieutenant Governor’s Office to publish the updated total number of registered voters in the state, separated by active voters and inactive voters, at the start of the candidate filing period, at the deadline for voter registration for every election and at the time of a statewide canvass following each regular general election.

The latest version of the bill would ask the lieutenant governor to register with the federal Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, which allows states to check an individual’s immigration status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

It would also mandate Henderson’s office to come up with a plan to identify voter registration anomalies based on the number of registered voters in a single-family home address.

Finally, the bill would provide in greater detail requirements for election officers to video monitor all ballots continuously during ballot intake, signature verification, ballot scanning, ballot sorting, ballot preparation and ballot storage.