On Sunday NPR published a hit piece on The Gateway Pundit and several conservative investigators and politicians. The article was in defense of the highly controversial voter roll maintenance system, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
There are 3 versions of the same NPR story, using different titles. A couple of them list several staff names and roles, and that they also used staff from their “Investigation Desk”. Below is some of what they listed and shows 7 names, without including staff from the Investigation Desk.
NPR site: This story was brought to you by voting correspondent Miles Parks and NPR’s Investigations Desk. It was produced by Monika Evstatieva and edited by Ben Swasey and Barrie Hardymon. This episode was produced by by Monika Evstatieva and edited by Ben Swasey and Barrie Hardymon. Data reporting by Nick McMillan. Fact checking by Barbara Van Woerkom. Audio engineering by James WillettsJ
Roughly a half dozen NPR staff were recently assigned to publish a 6,000 word article defending the ERIC voter registration system. Journalists, investigators, editors, even a producer were involved. They scoured hundreds of thousands of social media posts to determine exactly when the concerns about ERIC started. They discovered it was The Gateway Pundit reports back in January 2022 that started it all.
Our 4 part ERIC series back in January 2022 started the movement, as shown in their NPR chart.
These articles previously posted at The Gateway Pundit have gone viral and are being passed on to state officials who are working to ensure free and fair elections.
** ERIC Part 1: Who’s “Cleaning” Our Voter Rolls? ERIC Now in 31 States
** ERIC Part 2: Largest U.S. Counties Removed ZERO to TWO Ineligible Voters
** ERIC Part 3: The Founding of the Nation’s Largest Voter Roll Clean-up Operation
** ERIC Part 4: A Response to the Panicked Media Attacks
In their hit piece, NPR goes on to attack those questioning ERIC’s lack of transparency, lack of reforms, and bias. In addition to the article, NPR produced a half-hour podcast, social media posts, and uses 3 different story titles to expand reach.
Roughly one-third of ERIC members have decided to leave ERIC since our first report. This appears to be NPR’s attempt at a full blown PR campaign to save ERIC. The biased media won’t discuss valid concerns, even those from state election officials like the 7 listed here from Virginia.
Today we are adding never before released video to build our case against the ERIC system.
Pew Center On The States was a temporary division of Pew Charitable Trust. They employed the people and vendors who created Pew’s “Voter Modernization Project”. Pew held meetings with election officials across the country to present this “Project”. It required States to deploy online voter registration systems, a critical part of their plan. They also requested States join the new ERIC program. The stated goal was to go after those 25% of American citizens not yet registered to vote.
ERIC was founded by fired DOJ Attorney David Becker and was originally funded by the Soros Open Society.
The video excerpt below starts at the 55:45 mark. David Becker explains the ERIC system, by default, will disproportionally find people of color, young people, and the economically disadvantaged who are not yet registered to vote. These are the known groups the Democrat Party refers to as their base. Pew brought 13 people to this 2011 meeting to help convince California election officials to join ERIC. All but one of the 13 are known leftists and Democrat Party advocates.
To learn what to say, and what not to say about ERIC, Pew hired two polling firms. Those results from the focus groups are still used by ERIC to influence election officials and the public. In video #1, pollster Bill McInturff explains one dilemma.
Citizens got very concerned about privacy when told all 10 data sources used by ERIC to find unregistered voters. — So the pollsters simply decided to stop telling people these 10 sources in order to obtain a better response. This is an example of manipulation used by ERIC.
The ERIC project and staff were under the employ of Pew Center On The States. They were one in the same, until ERIC become a non-profit. See the red correction.
ERIC Data Sources Used to Find Unregistered Voters:
- Voter Registration databases
- State DMV database (ID & Licenses)
- USPS Change of address (NCOA)
- Social Security Death Index
- Public “phonebook” databases
- Military databases
- Public Assistance Agency databases
- Consumer Credit Agency databases
- …and more.
Even today, the ERIC website only mentions the first 4 data sources in our above list, and won’t disclose the rest.
As ERIC membership stalled around 2015, the competitor Kansas service “Interstate Crosscheck” was thriving. Crosscheck was a free service developed to help States clean voter rolls. It had nothing to do with finding unregistered voters or GOTV drives. The competitor product ERIC was just the opposite. It mandates member States conduct voter registration campaigns using lists provided by ERIC. It has no requirement to clean voter rolls and will not allow States to release any ERIC created lists.
Under the leadership of Kansas SOS Kris Kobach, Crosscheck added 26 States over 5 years. By 2016 Crosscheck had 30 member States and roughly 100 million voters in the database. In mid 2017, Trump launched his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Although Pence was Chairman, it was Vice-Chair Kris Kobach doing all the work. He immediately began to contact State officials for records. This terrified the left, so they attacked.
Florida election officials released voter info for an open records request in 2017. It included regular voter data, but 945 names contained part of their Social Security number. This tiny error triggered the Department of Homeland Security to conduct a security audit of Crosscheck. This was truly unprecedented. The ACLU then filed a class action lawsuit against Kobach and Kansas. ACLU worked with leftist groups like Common Cause Indiana to sue States using Crosscheck. Even boutique law firms like Chicago’s Edelson PC joined in for their pound of flesh.
To protect bloated voter rolls, the left launched a massive attack against Kobach and Crosscheck. Lawsuits, DHS audit, academia papers, data analysts, and other leftists got involved. The onslaught of negative media came from NPR, USAToday, APnews, Propublica, even Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. Their sources included people involved with ERIC like David Becker, staff from CDT and the Brennan Center. Brennan is funded by Soros. Since the mid-2000’s Brennan Center has been the left’s major group for litigation and election policy to prevent the removal of voters from rolls, against voter ID, and most other security measures.
Note, the DHS has never conducted a security audit of ERIC!
CrossCheck was shut down for that 20017 DHS audit hoping to return after the lawsuits. When the court ruling and settlement agreement was announced in 2019, the new Kansas SOS decided Crosscheck was over. The lefts lawfare against States using Crosscheck was just to burdensome for election officials. During those two years NPR and their Kansas City affiliate published over 30 negative articles attacking Crosscheck and Kobach.
The left even brought in experts from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard to discredit Crosscheck with analysis papers. Years earlier, some of these same groups published glowing papers that pushed ERIC. It became glaringly obvious the leftist groups had no interest in improving Crosscheck, or letting it come back to life.
NPR relentlessly attacked the conservative Crosscheck service and Kris Kobach. They now endlessly defend the leftist-founded ERIC program and David Becker. NPR, what hypocrites!
Miles Park and his handful of NPR misfits forgot to mention these important details in their report.
NPR could not refute our reporting so they resorted to typical personal insults and smears.
NPR also published several inaccuracies about The Gateway Pundit that are not even remotely true. The NPR staff pulled these from a Gateway Pundit entry in Wikipedia – a far left opinion website. They can expect a letter from our attorney in the coming days.
For the record, we are very proud of our reporting. It is interesting that the NPR team spent more time attacking individuals than defending ERIC. We are working to ensure free and fair elections. For some reason, this is a threat to NPR?
