David Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assesses vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. Previously, he worked as the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director, managing the administration of all federal, state, county, and local district elections.
Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a new system, the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) that he said would improve the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls by comparing the state’s voter registration information to the state’s driver’s license database, the National Change of Address File, the Social Security Death Index, and voter lists of five other states. Sound like a product worth building? The good news is that someone has already tested the concept and shown it works. The bad news -- that same entity is the interstate compact for sharing voter registration that Allen left immediately upon assuming office – the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
Allen touted the security of AVID by stressing that voter information would be housed on a server in Alabama, and that the state would get information directly from its own agencies and other states directly, rather than through a third party. While noteworthy, neither of these measures offers strong assurances about the security of AVID.
More important for AVID is how Alabama’s voter information will be stored and transmitted.
When Alabama was part of ERIC, its voter information was kept in one central location with all the other ERIC member states. Now, Alabama has memorandums of understanding to share voter information with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, and is looking to make similar agreements with more states. That means that there will be many more connections for Alabama to monitor to ensure that its voters’ information is not compromised, a potential threat that is not merely abstract.
In 2005, the Kansas Secretary of State initiated a voter registration program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (IVRC) with Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska that combined each state’s voter rolls into a database and sought to identify whether voters in different states voted in the same election. By 2014, the program had expanded to twenty-nine states. Unfortunately, IVRC had inadequate data security protocols in place that contributed to the accidental disclosure of sensitive, personal information for 1,000 Kansas voters in 2018, raising potential concerns about these voters being subjected to identity theft, foreign interference, and other forms of tampering.
Close attention will also need to be paid to how Alabama’s voter information is stored, particularly since data storage practices vary from state to state. ERIC addresses data storage by not possessing the raw data of sensitive, personally identifiable information, such as date of birth, social security numbers, or driver’s license numbers. Instead, that information is “hashed” by states before it is sent to ERIC as a string of characters that is not human readable or decodable. Then ERIC hashes it again, so that even the states cannot reconstitute the records. Alabama isn’t naïve to preparing and securely transmitting data, but neither were other states who recently engaged in similar efforts without success.
Another potential concern with AVID is whether it will be as helpful as ERIC. For example, when Alabama was part of ERIC from 2016 through early 2022, ERIC identified more than 19,000 voter records of potentially deceased Alabama voters, and 98% of those voter records were subsequently removed from Alabama’s voter rolls. One big reason for this success was because Alabama’s voter list was compared to the voter lists of more than half of the other states, along with those states’ driver’s licensing data, the National Change of Address File, and the Social Security Death Index. It is hard to see how a system with five states can provide the same quality of information as one with twenty-five.
AVID will hopefully help improve the accuracy of Alabama’s voter rolls, but it is far from a certainty, particularly ahead of 2024.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.