Letter in Support of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR) and CEIR Executive Director David Becker

We write as Republicans and conservatives, who have worked for election integrity, security, and the rule of law. Today, election officials around the country are better protecting election integrity than ever before, but they, and those that work to support them, are besieged by a steady stream of disinformation, designed to weaken our democracy and voters’ confidence.

One disturbing example is the disinformation being spread about David Becker, and the nonpartisan nonprofit that he leads, the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR). Extremists are targeting Becker and CEIR, seeking to undermine their work to support the professional civil servants who work to ensure secure elections.

Becker has worked in the field of elections for 25 years, and has worked with both sides of the aisle to modernize, secure and cultivate accessible elections. He began working at the Department of Justice Voting Section in 1998, during the Clinton administration, and continued until 2005, working twice as long in the W. Bush administration. His most notable case was Georgia v. Ashcroft, where Becker led the government’s efforts in 2001 to challenge the redistricting plan drawn by the Georgia Democrats as a racial gerrymander. As a result, the Bush DOJ awarded Becker the Civil Rights Division’s highest honor for a career attorney – the Special Commendation for Merit. After the DOJ, Becker worked for a brief 1.5 years at People for the American Way, led at that time by a Republican, as a lawyer focusing on election issues. 

In 2008, Becker joined, and eventually led, the growing elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he spearheaded the effort to encourage more accurate, secure voter lists, resulting in the creation of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). He worked to ensure that the states themselves would run ERIC, under rules that they themselves agreed to and established. While never serving as a voting board member of ERIC, Becker currently serves in a purely non-voting ex officio role on the ERIC board. In a decade, ERIC has helped over half the states clean over 10 million out-of-date records from their lists. Becker additionally urged ERIC to create a successful program that has assisted states in identifying and prosecuting dozens of cases of potential voter fraud.

Since its inception in 2016, under Becker’s leadership, CEIR has been a leader in promoting bipartisan and nonpartisan solutions to election integrity. CEIR’s research in fields such as cybersecurity and voter registration have contributed greatly to the field. CEIR offered assistance to states to help them educate voters during the pandemic in 2020, entirely at the states’ discretion, with a bipartisan group of 23 states applying for and receiving assistance, including Republican-led states such as Florida, Missouri, and Ohio. Perhaps most notably, in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the threats to election officials that ensued, CEIR and Becker partnered with a bipartisan team of election attorneys, Bob Bauer and Ben Ginsberg, to create the Election Official Legal Defense Network, pairing election officials regardless of party with pro bono attorneys to assist and advise them.

CEIR works to maintain its nonpartisan and bipartisan credentials. Three of the six members of CEIR’s board are Republicans, and despite false claims to the contrary, CEIR has never taken any funding from George Soros or any organization affiliated with him. CEIR’s Chief of Staff worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee before joining CEIR. Becker has never had a job working for a political party or candidate, and does not contribute to any political campaigns. We are grateful for the work CEIR and Becker do on a daily basis to support election officials, all over the country and across the political spectrum, without regard to political outcomes. And we collectively reject the efforts of those who seek to weaken our democracy by attacking election officials and those who support them.