Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen stood at a podium at the state capitol in Montgomery and announced what he called a novel way for his state to keep its voter lists up to date.
The program, called AVID or the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, will use federal data, as well as voting lists from five other states, to monitor when voters move, die or illegally vote in two different states in the same election.
"We are the first state in the nation to implement a system like this," he said.
But his claim is missing a lot of context.
AVID appears to mimic a bipartisan, cross-state partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which Alabama was a member of until Allen took office.
He and a number of other Republican secretaries of state abandoned the group earlier this year after the far right began targeting the organization with conspiracy theories. When he vowed to pull Alabama out, Allen himself repeated a conspiracy theory about the involvement of liberal billionaire George Soros in ERIC.
Nine states — all Republican-led — have now withdrawn from ERIC.
They all left without a plan to replace it.
And now, experts and election officials are watching a scattershot effort on the right to essentially recreate what the system produced, with many players — both mainstream and fringe — throwing their hats in the ring to try to capitalize on the data void.
Many details about these evolving projects remain unclear, but the elections...
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