More than 2 1/2 years after Florida dropped its association with a bipartisan national voter database, Secretary of State Cord Byrd said Wednesday that the state has formed agreements with “multiple states” to share that voter information.
“Most of our transient people are coming from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, the states close to you,” Byrd told the House Government Operations Subcommittee. “So we’ve entered into memorandums of understanding in data sharing.”
How many states Florida has such MOUs with isn’t clear, but the Phoenix has learned that Florida has such agreements with at least four states: Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Byrd announced in March 2023 that after 3 1/2 years, Florida was terminating its membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), then a consortium of 30 states that shared data with each other to keep voter rolls accurate. The Sunshine State was one of several mostly conservative-led states to announce withdrawal, and it took place on the same day that President Donald Trump called on all Republican governors to leave ERIC.
“All Republican governors should immediately pull out of ERIC, the terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” the president posted on Truth Social. “It is a fools game for Republicans.”
Byrd said at that time that Florida had dropped out of ERIC because the organization was unwilling to address issues of election integrity, saying that the state had tried to back reforms to increase protections for personal information of Florida’s citizens, “but these protections were refused.” He also cited concerns about “ERIC’s potential partisan leanings.”
But on Wednesday, Byrd said the problem with ERIC was that it banned member states from sharing information about non-U.S. citizens.
“That’s a big red flag,” he said. “So we want to look at everybody who has the potential to be an illegal voter, whether they’re a citizen or a non-citizen … so that was one of the big red flags to me.”
Byrd added that the memorandums of understanding that Florida has signed with other states “don’t prohibit us from identifying non-citizen voters who may be registered.”
One of those MOUs formed an alliance with Alabama, as part of the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID). The Sunshine State is one of nine to coordinate voter information with Alabama. Other (red) states to do so include Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
AVID’s website notes that the program relies on state records, the U.S. Postal Service’s national change of address file, and the Social Security death index. However, those data-sharing agreements include driver’s license information.
According to the ERIC website, its shared data include voter registration and motor vehicle information. ERIC also obtains death data from the Social Security Administration and the National Change of Address Program from the U.S. Postal Service.
Another state that Florida has formalized a data sharing agreement with is Ohio.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced partnerships with Florida, Virginia, and West Virginia, according to a September 2023 press release. Each state “will implement state-specific data sharing and security protocols to allow for the secure exchange of voter information, giving both states in the agreement the ability to analyze records for evidence of cross-state voter fraud and duplicate voter registrations.”
The Phoenix has also been able to obtain memorandums of understanding signed in 2023 between Byrd and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and between Florida Department of State general counsel Joseph S. Van de Bogart and West Virginia’s then-deputy Secretary of State chief-of-staff Chuck Flannery.
“We have to tailor each MOU to each state, but we are entering into those agreements,” Byrd said.
He added that without a national voter database housed with the federal government, “we are doing what we can with the states that we have the most likely issue with voters moving in and out of state frequently to ensure that we’re catching people who are registered in more than one place.”
A spokesperson for the Florida Department of State promised Wednesday to look into how many states have such MOUs with Florida, but had not provided such information by late Thursday afternoon.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
