Lawsuit Accuses ERIC Of Privacy And Voter Rights Violations

Leftist election law activist David Becker, with the assistance of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, carried out a scheme depriving citizens of their privacy and voting rights, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by a civil liberties watchdog. 

The complaint charges that Becker is using the two left-leaning nonprofits he founded — the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research to “infiltrate WisDOT’s Division of Motor Vehicles (“DMV”) database to access the driving records containing the personal information of millions of Wisconsin residents and eligible American voters.” In doing so, the lawsuit alleges, Becker and ERIC “exploited” the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status in acquiring highly sensitive information for purposes strictly prohibited under the federal Driver’s Privacy and Protection Act (DPPA). 

Stunningly, the complaint charges that the Wisconsin Elections Commission hasn’t had a contract with ERIC for more than eight years, further exacerbating the alleged illegal data collection. An Elections Commission official denies the charge, telling The Federalist the membership agreement with the state-run voter monitoring system remains in effect. 

The lawsuit, brought by Citizen AG, a conservative civil liberties law firm, on behalf of La Crosse, Wisconsin, resident Jennifer McKinney, seeks declaratory relief, damages, and an injunction against ERIC, CEIR, Becker and the Department of Transportation from “obtaining, disclosing, and using personal information from driving records for voting or election-related purposes.” 

Becker and the others “have knowingly engaged in and will continue to knowingly and intentionally engage in a coordinated effort to obtain, use, and disclose sensitive, protected personal information of Wisconsin residence [sic] from driving records obtained through the Wisconsin DMV in violation of federal law, and with the intent to compromise and undermine the fundamental right to vote of millions of Wisconsin voters,” the court filing alleges. 

“This Complaint seeks not only to hold ERIC, CEIR, Becker, and WisDOT accountable, but to restore the integrity and public confidence in our nation’s nonpartisan electoral process,” the lawsuit adds. 

‘Hard-Core Leftist’

Becker launched the controversial ERIC in 2012 with a lot of money from leftist groups and a purported mission to serve as a “membership organization consisting of state election officials working together to improve the accuracy of state voter registration lists.” The lawsuit and ERIC’s critics, including several states that have left the compact in recent years, claim the center has failed that mission. 

Years before launching the nonprofit, Becker served as an attorney in the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He left the post in 2005 after an ethics complaint revealed that he had “contacted the City of Boston and offered his services to defeat a lawsuit brought by the DOJ — his own employer — seeking to enforce federal voting rights laws against the City,” the lawsuit states.  

“It was the most unethical thing I’ve ever seen,” Brad Schlozman, acting head of the Civil Rights Division at the time, told Legal Newsline in 2020. “Classic case of someone who should have been disbarred.”

“He’s a hard-core leftist,” Schlozman added. “Couldn’t stand conservatives.”

After leaving the DOJ, Becker took a position as director of the left-wing People for the American Way. A few years later, in 2008, Becker was tapped to serve as director of election initiatives at the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts.

“In an early meeting of election law experts, Becker and others in the organization decided that the biggest shortcoming in the American electoral process was voter registration. However, Becker believed that Congress was too politically divided to promote voter registration, so the nonprofit sector would have to step in,” nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch reports. 

ERIC was born. A vehicle for the leftist Brennan Center’s vision of putting “millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system.” 

‘Trojan Horse’

Under its agreement, state members pay the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual dues and give ERIC “unfettered access to its DMV databases,” the complaint states. In exchange, ERIC spends a lot of time reaching out to individuals it places on the member state’s “eligible but unregistered” (EBU) lists. As The Federalist has reported, those names include non-citizens. 

ERIC claims it’s all about improving voter roll accuracy, although, the complaint alleges, the voter tracking system has made voter lists “less accurate” over the years. 

“[T]hese membership agreements are nothing more than trojan horse contracts that Becker relies upon to infiltrate the statewide DMV databases of more than half the country, or 271 total votes of the Electoral College,” the lawsuit asserts. 

The sweeping use of private information, the complaint charges, is not permitted under the  Driver’s Privacy and Protection Act.   

“In fact, DPPA provides for fourteen (14) exceptions to the use of this highly-sensitive information and not one of these even tangentially pertains to voting or elections,” the lawsuit states. 

More so, the complaint alleges that ERIC is abusing privacy laws without the benefit of a contract with the Wisconsin Elections Commission. In seeking a copy of WEC’s membership agreement with ERIC, Citizen AG said the state regulator sent an agreement entered into with the long-defunct Government Accountability Board, which was shut down and replaced with WEC in 2016. 

“Despite being fully aware that Wisconsin’s contract with ERIC ended over 3,000 days ago June 30, 2016, and Wisconsin has never re-joined ERIC since, ERIC has continued to demand Wisconsin fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars comprised of taxpayer and federal money for ‘membership dues,’” the lawsuit alleges. 

“Even worse, ERIC has demanded that Wisconsin provide it with the State’s DMV data in blatant violation of the DPPA, and ERIC has been successful in obtaining personal information from driving records.”

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman Riley Vetterkind disputed the allegation.  

“Wisconsin is, and has been, a member of ERIC, as required by state law. The membership agreement has never been terminated and is still in effect,” Vetterkind said in an email response to The Federalist’s questions. 

‘Shell Game’

In 2016, Becker launched the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit whose claimed mission is to “restore trust in the American election system and promote election procedures that encourage participation and ensure election integrity and security.” 

Perhaps CEIR didn’t do itself any favors on the “trust” front when it raked in nearly $70 million in “Zuckbucks,” part of hundreds of millions of dollars that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan dropped into the 2020 election under the cover of Covid. As The Federalist has extensively detailed, the brunt of the funds were handed out in battleground states and used for get-out-the-vote campaigns targeting traditionally liberal voters. 

“CEIR’s Voter Education Grant Program was anything but educational: it was a partisan mission to inject capital into swing states and states within then-Democratic candidate Joseph Biden’s reach,” the lawsuit asserts. 

“In Michigan, for example, Becker gave Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson roughly $11.9 million for what Becker and CEIR reported as ‘urgent voter educational assistance.’ No educational component was attached to, or resulted from, these funds. Rather, Secretary Benson handed the money off to Michigan’s Center for Election Law and Administration (‘MCELA’), and the MCELA spent $11.7 million on Democratic consulting firms for ‘media strategy and purchase.’”

The lawsuit alleges Becker rolled out CEIR to “make it appear as though ERIC was fully-compliant” with privacy laws and use the sensitive data to “influence American elections.” The suit describes CEIR as “another layer to the shell game of liability.”

According to the complaint, ERIC receives and collects state resident data, while CEIR receives all non-member state dues funds. 

“ERIC then transmits the data it receives from the states to CEIR, which, in turn, creates mailing lists and consolidates the data into a format conducive to outreach efforts,” the lawsuit states. CEIR then sends the data back to ERIC, “which, in turn, returns the data to its member states, complete with new EBU’s and a handful of ineligible voter labels affixed thereto.”

CEIR uses the data to contact voters and pushes them to register, “and ERIC appears as though it produced data that helps its member states identify ineligible voters for removal in addition to providing labels that identify which voters are EBUs in the state,” the complaint asserts.  

Becker announced that he was stepping away from ERIC when he started CEIR, but he remained a non-voting member of the board. The lawsuit contends that “Becker still maintained and exhibited control over ERIC’s activities and objectives.” Late last year, Becker announced he would not accept renomination to the board following the departure of member states Missouri, Florida and West Virginia — part of an exodus of states from ERIC over the past few years. 

ERIC and CEIR officials did not return The Federalist’s email requests seeking comment. 

An official from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation said the agency does not comment on ongoing litigation. 

The lawsuit asserts that the defendants are violating the constitutional rights of voters “and undermining their confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, discouraging their participation in the democratic process, instilling in them the fear that their legitimate votes will be nullified or diluted, and actually diluting their votes.”

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.