Newly sworn-in Republican Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen hit the ground running on pointless and counterproductive “election integrity” measures on his first full day in office Tuesday and acted on a campaign promise by immediately announcing the state would be withdrawing from the interstate Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the Associated Press reports.
“I made a promise to the people of Alabama that ending our state’s relationship with the ERIC organization would be my first official act as Secretary of State. Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months,” said Allen in a statement.
What Allen left out however is that the whole point of ERIC is to prevent voter fraud by providing states with a single national database of registrations to ensure no one casts a ballot in more than one state in a single presidential or midterm contest, like those asshole MAGA snowbirds in The Villages, Florida were caught doing in the 2020 presidential election. It need not be stated this move is the polar opposite of a commitment to “election integrity,” and even Allen’s predecessor said as much. “[ERIC] helps identify duplicate registrations. It helps identify dual participation in elections. That’s a concern [and] there’s no other way that any state in the union can do that independently of ERIC,” now-former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill told NPR last year.
Allen should’ve at least come up with a better excuse than the lame “sharing private information” bullshit (as if it’s not the whole point of the system) if he couldn’t be bothered to take the lead on reforming ERIC’s cybersecurity practices he’s supposedly so goddamned worried about. But hey, “if it is ‘broke’ then don’t fix it, just break it some more” is the GOP way these days.