TALLAHASSEE — When Gov. Ron DeSantis opted last year to remove Florida from a multistate voter data-sharing agreement, advocates and elections officials feared it would become harder to detect illegal voting.
New data shows they might be right.
DeSantis’ voter fraud unit last year received 93% fewer referrals from other states about double-voters than it did the year before, an analysis by the Times/Herald shows.
The voter fraud unit received 72 tips from other states about people suspected of casting ballots in Florida and another state in the same election, a third-degree felony under Florida law. That’s down from at least 986 in 2022.
Those numbers are minuscule compared to the nearly 7.8 million Floridians who cast ballots in the November 2022 election alone. Far fewer of those tips led to criminal charges.
Some drop in referrals would be expected since there wasn’t a major election in 2023. Still, such a steep, sudden decline surprised elections supervisors and observers, who attributed it in large part to DeSantis’ decision in March last year to stop Florida from participating in the Electronic Registration Information Center, which shared information on voters in more than 30 states.
“We just lost access to it. It’s gone,” Polk County Supervisor Lori Edwards said. “Every supervisor of elections in the state knows we need this data to keep the (voter) rolls clean.”
DeSantis had Florida join the program, known as ERIC, in 2019. He said it would lead to “cleaner and more accurate voter registration rolls” and “reduce the potential for voter fraud.”
But on March 6, 2023, DeSantis’ secretary of state, Cord Byrd, announced Florida was leaving, citing the program’s “partisan tendencies” and concerns over protecting Floridians’ data.
The decision came as DeSantis was preparing a run for the GOP presidential nomination, and a year after DeSantis created a new election crimes office to target voter fraud.
Because of the new office, “Florida was well positioned to absorb the loss of ERIC data,” the office wrote in its annual report last year.
What is ERIC?
The multistate program was created to address one of the fundamental problems with the nation’s decentralized voting process.
Elections are carried out by the nation’s counties and states, meaning there is no national database of who is registered to vote, or where and when they vote. That makes it almost impossible to track voters who move to other states. (Florida had no easy way to even track voters who moved between counties until after the 2000 election.)
States in the association submit voter registration data and data from motor vehicle departments to the program. The system matches the information with other states and produces reports about duplicate voters, dead voters and voters who move. The association’s board is made up of state election officials across the country.
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Explore all your optionsIn 2022, the multistate partnership identified 1,177 voters who appeared to have voted both in Florida and another state in the same election, DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security wrote in its annual report that year. (Florida had 14.5 million active registered voters that year.)
That report includes 80 pages of spreadsheets detailing the type of tips the office received, and where they came from, which is how the Times/Herald calculated at least 986 tips about duplicate voters from other states.
The office’s 2023 report, released in January, did not mention how many people appeared to have voted twice. It mentioned a single arrest for the charge that year, of a 66-year-old Ocala woman accused of voting in both Marion County and Sussex County, New Jersey, in the 2020 primary and general elections.
The woman has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Data shows 93% drop
The office’s two annual reports, for 2022 and 2023, list dozens of pages of charts of individual, anonymized tips about potential criminal activity the office handled those years, including the county where it occurred and the source of the tip.
The potential crimes included people registering to vote despite having a felony on their record, ballot petition fraud and people voting twice in the same election. The sources of those tips included other states, citizen tipsters, election supervisors and police departments.
Tips about duplicate voters made up about half of all tips in both years.
Analysis of the reports showed that the office’s overall workload decreased by 65% between 2022 and 2023, from about 3,000 cases to about 1,000.
Some decline in such tips could be expected. Voter turnout in the November 2022 election, which would be investigated mostly in 2023, was not as high as the presidential election in 2020.
But there was a 93% decrease in one particular category between 2022 and 2023: tips about duplicate voters exclusively from other states — the type of information that would likely come from the multistate partnership.
A spokesperson for DeSantis’ Department of State, which includes the Office of Election Crimes and Security, did not dispute the findings.
Spokesperson Mark Ard said the state proactively removes people from Florida’s rolls who live in another state, so such referrals should be low.
“If they’re not registered, they can’t vote,” Ard wrote in an email.
Lake County Elections Supervisor Alan Hayes agreed that a drop in potential election fraud in 2023 would be expected because of voter turnout. But he also cited the state’s decision to stop sharing, and receiving, voter information.
“That eliminated a great source of alerts to potential duplicate voting,” Hayes said.
In some cases, state officials are using outside groups or anonymous citizens to identify potentially ineligible voters. Earlier this month, the office asked supervisors to look through a list of 10,000 voters compiled by right-wing activists, NBC News reported.
Edwards, the Polk County supervisor, said her office during her tenure has received two lists from the state about removing ineligible voters over the last two decades.
Both were from an anonymous tipster who uses an email account called “Totes Legit Votes.” The account has sent lists of potentially ineligible voters to election officials across the country. Three residents of The Villages in Sumter County arrested for voting twice in 2021 were reportedly first flagged by the account.
Edwards said of the 94 voters the account thought were ineligible in Polk County, 14 were removed from the rolls.
“It’s not functioning the same as ERIC,” Edwards said.
Why Florida left
The multistate program included dozens of states led by both Republicans and Democrats, but the system became the target of conspiracy theories and criticism on the right in 2021 and 2022.
The conservative website The Gateway Pundit ran a series of articles pointing to potential funding and support by the liberal billionaire George Soros and “left-wing activists.”
In March last year, Florida followed Missouri and West Virginia in leaving the program, citing concerns about protecting Floridians’ “personal information” and about the organization’s “potential partisan leanings.”
In follow-up emails, Florida’s secretary of state’s office also cited the potential costs of membership in the program. Using motor vehicle data, the program produces reports on residents who are eligible to vote, but not registered, and member states are supposed to send postcards to those people to get them signed up every two years. DeSantis touted the outreach effort when joining the program in 2019.
Florida did not comply with that provision in 2022. Because it didn’t participate, the office did not research costs, Ard said.
Since Florida withdrew, six more Republican-led states have also left the program. Those states have discussed creating an alternative, but it has not come to fruition. Florida has signed separate agreements with Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and West Virginia to share voter data, but Ard did not mention the state using the information.
The agreements with those four states don’t appear to have produced any results, according to Brad Ashwell, Florida state director for All Voting is Local, a left-leaning group that advocates for voting rights.
“So far, every supervisor we’ve spoken to was unaware the agreements even existed,” Ashwell said.
