A voter walks toward the stairs leading to an early voting polling location at the Lake Vista Community Center in New Orleans Friday, Oct. 25, 2024.(Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)
The voter registration data of Louisiana residents will be shared with officials in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi as part of an agreement to search for duplicate registrations on the voter rolls.
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, a Republican, announced the data sharing agreement in a press release Tuesday as a way to keep the state’s voter list up-to-date.
“Election integrity is my highest priority as Louisiana’s Secretary of State,” Landry said. “These agreements underscore how focused my office is on maintaining safe and secure elections, while also safeguarding voters’ sensitive data.”
Landry’s office now has a patchwork of similar agreements with only Republican states to try to replace the voter roll checks that were previously done under the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nationwide sharing system. Louisiana withdrew from ERIC in 2022 as part of an election-denial campaign that grew from President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.
While the privacy of voter registration data varies by state, election officials can often access registration details as part of voter list maintenance to determine whether they should be removed from the public voter rolls.