The Republican Party has an albatross around its neck, namely, the need to feed the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen. This canard has given them leeway to enact restrictions on the right to vote, typically targeting groups likely to vote for Democrats. DeSantis created a special force to arrest former felons who voted when they were not supposed to, but most of the handful who were arrested were released because the state had sent them registration cards encouraging them to vote.

The latest crazy maneuver by Republicans is to remove their state from a national database that protects election integrity, assuring that no one votes in two states.

First to drop out was Louisiana:

On a night in January 2022, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin stepped on stage in a former airbase in Houma, La.

With American flags draped from the stage, the topic of the night was democracy.

The state’s chief voting official joked that he was competing with a former LSU Tiger great playing in the NFL playoffs the same night.

“I want to thank you all for coming out, competing with Joe Burrow is pretty tough!” Ardoin laughed.

But these were election die-hards.

The group hosting the event — We The People, Bayou Chapter — is one of hundreds of so-called election integrity groups that have popped up across the country since 2020, motivated by former President Donald Trump’s lies about voting.

During the Q&A portion of the event, people asked about how to stop dead people from voting “to support the Democrats” and voiced a number of other popular election conspiracy theories.

“I think one of the reasons we had so much distrust from this past election was because all of a sudden either over the course of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, votes were discovered,” said one man, repeating a common false claim about how votes were tallied in 2020.

But Ardoin wasn’t just dropping by to talk about electronic voting machines or mail ballot fraud.

He was making an announcement: Louisiana would become the first state ever to pull out of an obscure bipartisan voting partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.

ERIC is currently the only system that can catch if someone votes in more than one state, which is illegal. And election officials widely agree it helps to identify dead people on voting lists.

But Louisiana was done with it.

“This week I sent a letter to [ERIC], suspending Louisiana’s participation in that program,” Ardoin said.

At the time, in early 2022, most Americans had never heard of ERIC.

But in Houma, it seems in large part due to a far-right misinformation machine, Ardoin’s announcement garnered 15 seconds of applause.

It was the first of many times to come in which Republican officials would turn their back on this tool they once praised, in an effort to score political points with their base.

This NPR investigation, which found video of the Houma event posted to Facebook, is the first to report that Ardoin announced his ERIC decision to conservative activists.

And a deeper look at the red-state exodus that followed — eight states and countinghave now pulled out of ERIC — shows a policy blueprint for an election denial movement, spearheaded by a key Trump ally, eager to change virtually every aspect of how Americans vote.

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