Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked the Justice Department this week to probe the reliability of a widely used digital voting system, as well as whether election nonprofits had improperly obtained private voter data.
Mullin’s concerns center around a multistate voter data collective — called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC — which is designed to prevent the sharing of any records “indicating an individual is a non-citizen,” Mullin wrote in a Wednesday letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche. Determining if the devices can cause problems has “direct implications” for efforts to tamp down illegal voting, the DHS secretary said.
Mullin’s request for a Justice Department investigation is the latest development in President Donald Trump’s administration’s attempt to cast doubt on voting machines as part of a crackdown on what the president calls widespread election fraud.
His letter also included assertions that ERIC collects or shares sensitive personal voter data, like DMV records, with the election nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research and called for an investigation into the group.
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CEIR Executive Director David Becker on Friday denied the accusations raised in Mullin’s letter.
“CEIR takes seriously the concerns raised in Secretary Mullin’s letter but firmly rejects any suggestion that it receives motor-vehicle or voter data on an ongoing basis, conditions grants on access to sensitive information, or uses such information for partisan purposes,” he wrote in a statement.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning law organization, has asserted that ERIC allows for “more precise matching than what states can do on their own,” calling efforts to discredit the system “conspiracy theories.”
Mullin’s letter also asked the DOJ to ensure that ballot-marking devices, which tally votes through bar codes or QR codes, comply with federal law, claiming that some electronically cast or counted ballots could be inaccurate.
DHS has found some systems that separate printed text and its identifying barcode, meaning the final paper record “may not be a reliable record for a manual audit,” Mullin wrote.
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