What's The Connection Between ERIC And George Soros' Investment In Catalist?
How Catalist identifies and targets 'eligible but unregistered' potential voters
ERIC’s EBU Refresh List, CEIR, and Soros
What’s the connection between the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and George Soros? It all starts with ERIC’s coveted ‘Eligible but Unregistered’ (EBU) refresh list. ERIC, using information from the state’s voter registration rolls, Department of Motor Vehicles, and the USPS, generates a list with information on eligible but unregistered constituents for all member states.
What is so important about the ERIC’s EBU list? Enter Catalist, the for-profit company to which billionaire George Soros provided the first $1 million for startup costs.
In an article by J. Christian Adams, he states, “Catalist provides much more sophisticated and much more granular data about subsets of Americans. The degree of granularity was never possible before Catalist, and Republicans have nothing to match it, for now. The most important thing Catalist allows the left to do is drive deeper into the pool of extreme left-wing Americans who are otherwise unmotivated to actually vote. Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which allows ERIC users to help motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.
You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. Whom you work for, what car you might drive, donations you have made, assumptions based on your neighborhood, anything in a public government database about you, consumer preferences, partisan preferences, what licenses you have, what you might have said to pollsters on the phone, memberships, how you treated the young left-wing activist knocking on your door a few years ago, and on and on and on.
Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The Obama administration’s lurch to the far left without consequence can be understood by understanding Catalist. Obama thrives politically by satisfying his base. Simply, Catalist is a game changer not just for politics, but for policy. It is the left’s machinery for fundamentally transforming America — and all of it is perfectly legal.”
According to the Capital Research Center, “In the “real world” of politics, Catalist is a key, perhaps even central element, in a well-thought-out, well-integrated strategy to mobilize specific interest groups on behalf of partisan interests seeking power. Catalist is serious about its goals, clear-eyed about who it has to mobilize, and what instruments it can use to mobilize them.”
As Sasha Issenberg writes in 2012 in The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, “Subscription-based access to this database, which consists of some 180 million registered voters and 85 million unregistered adults—essentially every adult in the United States—allows clients to combine demographic and political information with commercial data to help target political messages to large groups or individuals with unprecedented precision and effectiveness. But underneath the expanded use of screens were scores, a new political currency that represented an individualized way of predicting human behavior, where a campaign didn’t just profile who you were but knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.”
Why do the liberal progressives care about the eligible but unregistered citizens? Think of it this way. Catalist already has a “score” for each registered voter. They already know which registered voters are liberal progressives and micro-target them, right through until the polls close, to get out the vote (GOTV). Their liberal registered voters are like loyal customers; the left knows the registered voter inside and out. But for growth, they need to bring in more customers to add to Catalist and those are the eligible but unregistered (EBU) citizens.
Leading up to 2012, Obama’s team realized his base was splitting their support between Obama and Romney. Their solution was to register as many new liberal progressives as possible to target and persuade them to vote for Obama. Between the close of registration for the 2018 general election and the close of registration for the 2020 general election, states and territories reported receiving a record 103,701,513 registration applications—26,184,917 more applications than were received in the same period leading up to the 2016 general election.
The 2020 census, as did the 2010 census, provided a wealth of information the liberals needed to build the profiles on EBU citizens in Catalist so they could isolate the liberals and not waste time targeting conservatives.
From Right-To-Know requests, PA received two ERIC EBU contact lists in 2020. One in the June timeframe as indicated in an email from the Department of State (DOS) to all 67 PA counties, as indicated below.
The second request was made in October 2020 through DOS’s $13,260,000 CEIR grant, signed by CEO David Becker and then Secretary of State (SOS) Kathy Boockvar. PA’s DOS CEIR grant was the largest in the country and it included a kickback of $830,779 to ERIC for an updated EBU list.
Did ERIC’s EBU refresh list feed Catalist the contact information for their new liberal targets? It’s hard to find out the answers to these questions due to the privacy and intellectual property rights agreed to in the contracts.
The PA DOS - CEIR agreement states: “Intellectual Property and Project Data: Grantee shall own all right, title and interest, including all copyright interest, in and to any work product created in connection with the Grant project ("Project Work Product"), for example, mailings and other communications. Grantee hereby grants CEIR a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to use any Project Work Product in connection with its research, educational initiatives, or other work. In addition, should CEIR wish to conduct research to study the initiatives funded by the Grant, for example, measuring the impact of the educational communications, Grantee agrees to cooperate with CEIR, including providing data, as CEIR reasonably requests.”
Sounds like CEIR had free rein to do with ERIC’s EBU list what it wished. And my guess is that ERIC’s EBU report is generated in a format easily integrated with Catalist. ERIC needs removed from the equation. Taxpayer dollars are being sent to ERIC to manipulate voter rolls in member states, and, due to their privacy clause, we don’t fully understand their agenda. With David Becker still sitting on the ERIC board, it probably isn’t good!
Guest Author - Dr. Linda S. Sheckler
Dr. Linda S. Sheckler is a founding member of the Voice4Centre PAC and a retiree living in Spring Township, Centre County, PA. She previously served as Head of the System Analysis and Simulation Division in the Undersea Weapons Office of the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State. She holds two degrees from Penn State - a Ph.D. in Acoustics and a B.S. in Computer Science. Dr. Sheckler has over 29 years of modeling, simulation, and analysis experience in torpedo guidance and control.
Editor’s Note: This article is the third of four in a series from Dr. Sheckler that examines ERIC’s activities and origins as well as a look at other groups that oversee (or have some role in maintaining) voting integrity.
If one wanted to fund a vote trafficking operation you could use this EBU data mass register the individuals and then drop the ballots into drop box? You would not even need to receive the voter ID card.