Chances are, most Americans haven’t heard of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), but if you’re a Republican official with election administration responsibilities, it’s a safe bet the project is very familiar.

The idea behind ERIC is relatively straightforward. As a recent Politico report explained, “The group is responsible for identifying out-of-date registrations on member states’ rolls, which typically includes voters who moved either within the state or to another member state, or voters who died out of the state they’re registered to vote in.”

For officials concerned about the integrity of the voter rolls — a group that includes quite a few Republicans in red states — the project seemed to have obvious value, and since 2012, 30 states signed on as ERIC members. Since the United States has never created a national voter registration clearinghouse, this voluntary, member-based project became the country’s biggest data-sharing program.

Now, however, the operation is quickly shedding partners. The Associated Press reported Friday on the latest departure:

Election officials in Virginia have announced plans to withdraw the state from a bipartisan effort designed to ensure accurate voter lists and combat fraud — but that also has been caught up in conspiracy theories spread since the 2020 presidential election.

When ERIC launched a decade ago, Virginia’s then-governor, Republican Bob McDonnell, celebrated the commonwealth’s role as a founding member. Now, election officials appointed by Virginia’s current governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, are abandoning the bipartisan effort.

They have quite a bit of company. Louisiana was the first to walk away from ERIC, and it was followed by Alabama. In early March, they were joined by Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia.

That same day, Donald Trump used his social media platform to push some advice: “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. It is a fools [sic] game for Republicans.”

Soon after, Iowa and Ohio withdrew from the compact, and Texas indicated that they’re prepared to move to a different data-sharing initiative.

A recent New York Times report noted that it was just last year when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges.” Two years earlier, DeSantis called the Sunshine State’s role in ERIC “the right thing to do.”

This year, it was DeSantis’ administration that abandoned ERIC pointing to “partisan tendencies” that don’t appear to exist in reality.

Georgia’s top elections official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, recently told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “Any state that prioritizes politics over best practices and opts out of ERIC ahead of next year’s presidential election actually runs the risk of having outdated voter rolls. If states are interested in strengthening elections, withdrawing from ERIC does just the opposite.”

A Washington Post editorial added, “If Republicans are serious about protecting election integrity and the rule of law, they’d celebrate ERIC as the enormous success it has been in helping states clean up their voter rolls by identifying people who have died or moved, as well as those who have cast ballots in multiple states. But other red states might soon head for the exits, causing the system to collapse — and making ballot fraud harder to detect next year.”

So why is it, exactly, that so many Republicans are rejecting the ERIC initiative? Because some right-wing conspiracy theorists started targeting the operation with false claims — including, predictably, untruths about George Soros. Soon, GOP activists believed the bogus assertions, and officials in red states felt the need to accommodate those who fell for the conspiracy theories.

Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director, released an open letter in early March, trying to set the record straight. It was apparently too late.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of State, explained to Politico that the right’s criticisms of ERIC “are not rooted in anything legitimate.”

As is too often the case, that’s proving to be irrelevant in Republican politics, and ERIC’s future is in doubt.