evidence: PARKS: And in an odd twist, the fringe conspiracies on her show are now pushing Republicans to abandon one of the best tools out there to catch voter fraud. It's known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. And I've spent the past few months embedded with NPR's investigations team looking at the far-right's effort to blow ERIC up. Here's Mitchell on her podcast again. [...] PARKS: But when we got into the actual problems with ERIC, Allen told me it wasn't really about that. One issue that keeps coming up is this alleged connection to George Soros. The liberal billionaire is at the center of a lot of false right wing and anti-Semitic conspiracies. The initial Gateway Pundit article calls ERIC Soros funded in its headline. And when Allen made his announcement, he said, quote, "Soros can take his minions and his database and troll someone else because Alabamians are going to be off limits permanently." But when I asked him about that accusation, he backed off it. [...] PARKS: Just to be clear, the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations has given money to Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped develop ERIC. But there's no evidence that Soros has ever had any involvement with ERIC. The data security concern Allen mentioned comes up a lot too. But ERIC encrypts all the sensitive data it gets from states, like dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, before it even analyzes them.