How A Beloved Anti-Voter Fraud Tool Fell Victim To Conspiracies

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Daily News, News, Politics

4.4 • 25.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A rare bipartisan success story, the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, quietly helped to clean up voter rolls and catch fraud for nearly a decade — until it became the target of the far-right and a Trump allied lawyer.

NPR Voting Correspondent Miles Parks and NPR's Investigations Team traced the secret meetings and grassroots pressure to dismantle an obscure elections tool — giving the election denial movement its biggest policy victory yet.

To read the investigation, head here.

This episode: voting reporter Miles Parks.

This episode was produced by by Monika Evstatieva and edited by Ben Swasey and Barrie Hardymon. Data reporting by Nick McMillan. Fact checking by Barbara Van Woerkom. Audio engineering by James Willetts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
0:06.6	I'm Usma Khaled.
0:08.2	In many corners of the country, this false notion that the 2020 election was stolen is still
0:14.5	flourishing.
0:15.5	And large part because of a woman named Clea Mitchell.
0:18.5	Thank you, Clea Mitchell.
0:19.5	Thank you for that explanation.
0:20.5	Really interesting.
0:21.5	And kind of a Pauline.
0:22.5	Thank you, Tucker.
0:23.5	Clea Mitchell is somebody with great courage.
0:25.5	And she's in.
0:26.5	Paul Mitchell by name, but she's an election attorney who was a central figure in former
0:31.4	president Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.
0:35.7	She was on that infamous phone call when Trump pressured Georgia election officials
0:39.5	about the state's results.
0:41.1	But the people of Georgia and the people of America have a light to know the answers.
0:45.9	Mitchell hosts a podcast about voting.
0:48.3	Hello, welcome to this episode of who's counting with Clea Mitchell.
0:53.0	This is Mitchell's influence is growing and the fringe conspiracies on her show are pushing
0:57.6	Republicans to abandon one of the best tools out there to fight voter fraud.
1:02.8	Miles Parks, along with NPR's investigations team, has this story about a year long pressure
	...

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