Virginia is entering into new agreements to share voter data.
Virginia was a founding member of a group of states sharing election data to make sure voter rolls were accurate. Now, Virginia is among a handful of states leaving the group, spending more money and creating more security risk in the process, says Center for Election Innovation and Research founder David Becker.
"So, there is no group," Becker says. "These are all one-to-one agreements. And in many ways, it's reviving a system that failed based on technology that's over two decades old whereby states were sharing data by sending data to another state and having them try to match it."
The one-to-one agreements include West Virginia and Ohio, which have also left the interstate group. Virginia also has agreements with DC, Georgia and South Carolina, which are still in the group. Greta Bedekovics is associate director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress.
"It's sad to see that Virginia is in some ways leading the way for this because they were one of founding members of ERIC as an organization, and that was only pretty much a decade ago," Bedekovics. "So, that shows us how far election disinformation and election denialism has seeped into our democracy in just the last decade."
Supporters of the bipartisan election data group are disappointed in Virginia's departure from the collaboration, and they fear that the move will create more chaos in future elections.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
