Republican Party of Texas releases Election Integrity update
March 22, 2023 | Austin, TX
A message from the Republican Party of Texas:
Because election integrity is the top priority for the Republican Party of Texas in the 88th Legislative Session, we want to update you on recent legislative actions regarding election security and the prosecution of election fraud.
This week, the Senate passed SB 2 by Senator Bryan Hughes. SB 2 restores the penalty for illegal voting to a second-degree felony, its historic level, and undoes the change from 2021 that reduced it to a misdemeanor. This is a huge victory for the Senate. It will now go over to the House for a committee hearing. So stay tuned for more updates.
Additionally, SB 921, authored by Senator Bryan Hughes which bans ranked choice voting in Texas, passed out of the Senate State Affairs Committee and will now go to the Senate Floor. Representative Briscoe Cain filed companion HB 3611 in the House. There has been a national movement to implement ranked choice voting in several states and localities across the country. To Sen. Hughes and leadership’s credit, they are being proactive in ensuring this method of voting is statutorily banned altogether in Texas. Ranked choice voting is a confusing method of voting in which the voter ranks candidates in order of their preference. Often, winners are declared with less than 50% of the total ballots cast on election day as voters fail to properly mark second, third and fourth place choices and their votes end up being discarded from the election.
Senate Bill 1070 was also filed by Senator Bryan Hughes, which prevents the collection of data outside of the original framework of the Texas Interstate Crosscheck Program. HB 2809 by Jacey Jetton is the House companion. The Interstate Crosscheck Program was created in 2015 to prevent duplication of voter registration in more than one state and was a free service organized by the Kansas Secretary of State, to help states with communication and record keeping. As of 2020 however, Texas is in a contractual agreement with the national group “Electronic Registration Information Center” (ERIC) for the purposes of maintaining voter lists across state lines.
The ERIC membership agreement collects an extensive amount of personally identifiable information and data related to elections going far beyond the requirements of our Interstate Crosscheck Program. Moreover, ERIC has forced the State of Texas to reach out to every eligible, or possibly eligible voter, who is not registered to vote. Given this type of outreach, Texas is now participating in a national voter registration drive at taxpayer expense. The data collected is given to third parties like the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) which has partisan affiliations and Senzing, an artificial intelligence gathering system. The contract with ERIC also costs taxpayers over $1.5 million dollars in membership and maintenance costs. Senator Bob Hall’s bill, SB 399, has a similar goal to withdraw from ERIC, given the data collection concerns.
According to a recent Secretary of State press release, Keith Ingram will now serve in a “newly created position to develop and manage an interstate voter registration crosscheck program.” This is good news for our concerns at the Republican Party of Texas. Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and Ohio have already severed ties with ERIC citing privacy violations. California and New York never participated in the program. Colorado, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Alaska and DC all have pending lawsuits against ERIC. Clearly many member states have grown frustrated with the enormous amounts of data collection performed by ERIC.
At the quarterly State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) meeting held in Austin, two significant election resolutions passed to express priorities of the grassroots. The first demanded withdrawal from ERIC and the second was a resolution to ban ranked choice voting by statute. The Republican Party of Texas platform supports withdrawal from ERIC and clean voter rolls under Planks 241 and 242.
Take Action
Email Secretary of State Jane Nelson at elections@sos.texas.gov and kindly ask her to withdraw from the ERIC membership agreement. Absent legislation, the State of Texas is still a member of ERIC and actively sends sensitive information to third parties. The Secretary of State has the authority to end the contract, as other states have done.
In addition, please contact both your House and Senate members here expressing support and passage of the important bills mentioned above to rectify our urgent concerns in Texas elections. Thank you for your activism over the last two years which has brought this topic of ERIC and RCV to such a laser sharp focus. We appreciate your hard work!