Jesse Wegman for the NYT on the red state exodus from ERIC — a shift impossible to square with any supposed interest in maintaining voter rolls and preventing fraud.

Republican officials have for a long time rightly insisted on the importance of election integrity. So why are so many of them rejecting what was, until a few months ago, widely agreed to be the single best program for shoring up that integrity?

Over the past 18 months, eight Republican-led states (with more likely to follow) have resigned their membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan data clearinghouse that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate and up-to-date. . . .

Other states, all Republican-led, began to follow, each with dubious rationales. Some said they didn’t like being required to spend money to reach out to unregistered voters, who they believed (wrongly) are more likely to vote for Democrats. Others cited the Soros conspiracy theory. Florida officials cited undefined “partisan tendencies” and concerns about data security (though ERIC has never had a data breach). The basic theme of all the complaints was distilled in a social-media post by Donald Trump, who claimed in March that ERIC “pumps the rolls” for Democrats. . . .

“The very actors who said they care about list maintenance the most are now abandoning the only tool they had available,” said Ms. Lang. “It seems like the goal is to create chaos — to lead to bloated rolls so they can point at them and say, ‘Look at the problem we have,’ even though it’s a problem entirely of their own making.”