HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s voter rolls have been a frequent target of conservative politicians who believe the disproven narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.

Last fall, state Senate Republicans pursued a “forensic audit” of the voter roll to verify voters’ identities. And Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has pledged to reset the voter rolls and require all Pennsylvanians to re-register in order to cast a ballot in future elections — although federal law prohibits this.

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One of the reasons why election officials are confident in the accuracy of the commonwealth’s voting rolls is because the Department of State isn’t maintaining them alone.

In 2016, Pennsylvania became a member of the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC, which was created by seven founding states and the Pew Charitable Trusts, is now independent and is funded and overseen by its 31 member states and the District of Columbia. The idea behind ERIC was to provide something that could approximate a national voter database, said Marian Schneider, who was a deputy secretary of state at the time and now is the senior voting rights policy counsel for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

“The concept was, since we don’t have a national voter registration database, let’s make an algorithm and use data from the states to compare and give member states more up-to-date information about voters, like if they’ve moved, or whether they’ve died or not,” she said. “It is basically a consortium of members that pay dues and the benefit of joining is that there are a lot of tools to clean up the voter rolls.”

Every 60 days, the commonwealth transmits voter registration and Division of Motor Vehicles data — which includes driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth — to ERIC using a secure portal, said Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson for the Department of State.

Then every May, ERIC sends the Department of State reports of Pennsylvania voters who seem to have moved, because they filed a change-of-address form with the U.S. Postal Service or because they have popped up in another member state’s DMV records or voter roll.

Say a Pennsylvania voter moves to Ohio — also a member of ERIC — and gets a new driver’s license and registers to vote there without canceling their Pennsylvania registration. ERIC would detect that change because it receives data from Ohio, and would alert Pennsylvania that the voter may have changed residency.

Even if a Pennsylvania voter moves to a state that’s not a member of ERIC, like New Jersey or New York, the program would detect that move through the National Change of Address database.