Reposted by @squidandtie.bsky.social
After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
![ERIC had been relatively uncontroversial since its creation. The idea behind it started in 2008, when election officials identified the potential for people to have multiple registrations in different states — in itself not surprising in a country that is at once highly mobile but operates a decentralized voting system — creating the potential for voting in different states. ERIC offered a tool that could track that problem, through a mixture of data sourcing and analytical tools that minimized false positives. By identifying moves and deaths, it allowed states to keep the voting rolls accurate. In 2013 it had seven members, which would increase to 32 states at its height.
Then in January of 2022, the Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin dropped out of ERIC. He made his announcement to a group of far right election activists, to sustained applause. But for other election officials it was a puzzle. One state election official who worked for GOP secretaries of state said:
Everybody looked at this and said, 'This is insane, what are you talking about?' As soon as [Ardoin] did that — that created this pressure on the other Republican states that wasn't there before](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2rrp7amblhg3xoly5n5huiqv/bafkreigihnsv4wsriiurs7maewx4ie3qsji36tqg4oytoc4annoa54nw2m)
