Former President Donald Trump waves as he steps off his plane at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport earlier this month.

Former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen 2020 presidential election has been thoroughly debunked, but it still inflicts damage in Texas.

The latest casualty is our state’s participation in the bipartisan Electronic Registration Information Center—or ERIC—that helps keep voter rolls accurate and up to date. The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature voted in May to withdraw from this worthy program amid a false right-wing conspiracy theory that claims ERIC is in cahoots with liberal billionaire George Soros to help Democrats win elections.

Zealots continue to fuel false voter fraud accusations

It’s a shame that GOP lawmakers allowed a vocal but small contingent of far-right conspiracy theorists to persuade them to abandon ERIC. The initiative has helped 30 states, including Texas, scour voter and motor vehicle registrations and death and change of address data to purge ineligible voters, investigate potential illegal voting and provide voter registration information to the public. Acting at the legislature’s behest, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson canceled Texas’ ERIC membership in July. The withdrawal, described by Nelson’s office as a cost-saving measure, becomes effective in October. Texas is one of nine states with Republican governors or secretaries of state that have ended, or announced plans to end, their ERIC membership.

The Texas Legislature’s vote to withdraw, and Gov. Greg Abbott’s signing of the bill, are stupefying moves that threaten to undermine—not protect—election security. Withdrawing from ERIC is all the more baffling because the GOP claims election integrity is a top priority, and has passed extensive voter restrictions under the guise of voter integrity to appease conservatives. But Republican lawmakers don’t seem to be in sync with their own party on whether voter security is worth their concern. A poll of Texas Republicans and conservative independents by the nonpartisan Secure Elections Project in April and May found that 83% are satisfied with elections in Texas, and 86% trust election officials to be fair and accurate. Just 13% reported having “not much confidence” in elections and just 1% said they have “no confidence at all. Those figures shouldn’t surprise anyone because there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas or nationally.

Despite the facts, GOP lawmakers have chosen to pander to a small number of misguided fanatics who, in reaction to Trump’s Big Lie, continue to claim without evidence that elections are rigged, and that a left-wing billionaire puppet master is bankrolling widespread but somehow undetectable voter fraud. That’s preposterous considering Republicans control the governor’s office, both chambers of the legislature and every other statewide office.

Election lies undermine voting system

Texas’ withdrawal from ERIC isn’t the only fallout from Trump’s election lies. In September 2022, then-Secretary of State John Scott told The Associated Press that his office regularly received threats, as did many hard-working local election officials across the state. Scott resigned in December. Heider Garcia, a widely respected director of Tarrant County’s elections, quit his post in April after receiving death threats. On Aug. 4, a Texas man who encouraged a “mass shooting of poll workers” was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in federal prison.

All the while, the well-meaning folks at ERIC have worked to make elections more secure. Thankfully, Texas law requires state officials to participate in multi-state data-sharing to verify its voter rolls. Now it’s up to Nelson’s office to come up with a suitable replacement at a cost of less than $100,000, as mandated by SB 1070, which ordered withdrawal from ERIC.

Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for Nelson, told the Editorial Board the cost of ERIC membership went from $116,000 to $175,000 with the withdrawal of eight other states prior to Texas. That means Texas would be paying more for less data, she said. But Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Round Rock who serves as vice chair of the House elections committee, said any replacement is likely to be inferior and more expensive.

“It’s going to cost us more to recreate the wheel and it won’t be as efficient,” Bucy told the Editorial Board. “It’s bad government on top of bad government, leading to less secure election data.”

Elected officials are supposed to lead, not follow a herd of discredited, dangerous political zealots who put their trust in a twice-impeached former president who lost the 2020 election and then tried to overturn it, ending in his indictment on racketeering charges in Georgia on Monday. With the 2024 election cycle approaching, Republican elected officials should at long last do what is right and denounce Trump’s shameful lies about voter fraud.

Refusal to do so is the real threat to election integrity in Texas.