Spanberger orders Virginia back into ERIC as voting-roll changes tighten

Spanberger reverses Youngkin’s ERIC exit, adding timing limits on purge actions

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has issued an executive order that returns the state to the multistate voter roll program known as ERIC and tightens when election officials can remove ineligible voters before federal contests.

The order, signed earlier this week, reversed Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to leave ERIC, a nonpartisan organization that exchanges voter registration and identification data among member states, according to the Associated Press report. Advocates said the changes are designed to improve the accuracy of Virginia’s voter rolls and limit the risk that eligible voters are removed close to Election Day.

ERIC is used to identify voters who have died, moved out of state, updated their contact information, or had duplicate registrations, the report said. Supporters of Virginia’s return to ERIC have argued that multistate data sharing can help election offices keep voter records current while avoiding errors that lead to wrongful disenfranchisement.

Spanberger’s executive order also limits the removal of ineligible voters from the rolls to 90 days before a federal primary or general election, AP reported. The timing restriction will apply this year to the congressional midterm primary in August and the general election in November.

In a release cited by the report, Spanberger said, “With even more days of voting on our calendar this year, I’m acting early to strengthen Virginia’s transparent, robust voting process and protect the rights of all eligible Virginia voters.”

Joan Porte, president of the League of Women Voters of Virginia, told ARLnow that Youngkin’s decision to remove Virginia from ERIC made it harder to exchange information with other states to keep rolls accurate. Porte said the return to ERIC would make it easier to check whether people who have moved should be removed from Virginia’s rolls.

Porte also said ERIC had become the target of a “ridiculous conspiracy theory ” about voter fraud that she said has been debunked by studies, including one by the conservative Heritage Foundation, AP reported. As an example, she referenced election officers stopping Youngkin’s then-underage son from casting a ballot.

Chris Kaiser, a policy director at the Virginia ACLU, said Spanberger’s executive order responds to actions he said blocked thousands of voters from casting ballots in recent years. Kaiser argued that the combination of the 90-day federal-election deadline and the ERIC return would help restore “critical guardrails against wrongful disenfranchisement,” ensure clarity and integrity in Virginia’s electoral system, and “reaffirm the unalienable truth that in order for democracy to function as intended, every eligible voter must have the opportunity to participate in the democratic process,” AP reported.

The League of Women Voters of Virginia is also involved in an active lawsuit against the state’s voter roll purges weeks before the 2024 general election, following an executive order by Youngkin, according to the report. Porte pointed to a requirement in the National Voting Rights Act that, she said, voter roll removals cannot happen within 90 days of a federal election.

General Assembly legislation would also help codify Spanberger’s executive order, AP reported. The report said SB 57 by state Sen. Schuyler T. VanValkenburg would require Virginia’s membership in ERIC and is headed to the governor’s desk, with Spanberger having an April 13 deadline to act. It also said HB 28 by Del. Rozia Henson, which would set the 90-day deadline for voter roll purges before federal elections, was tabled until 2027, and that the bill would provide a process for voters to confirm citizenship status before cancellation and would increase the response period after a cancellation notice.