Republicans seek to purge 225,000 North Carolina voters

Two lawsuits, based on zero evidence, accuse the North Carolina Board of Elections of allowing hundreds of thousands of nonresidents to register to vote. But the suits, elections officials say, misunderstand and misrepresent the data.

North Carolina Republicans sued the state board of elections twice last month after it refused their demands to disenfranchise more than 200,000 voters in violation of federal law. 

Under federal statutes, states are barred from removing voters from the registered voting rolls en masse within 90 days of an election. But the lawsuits, filed by Republicans well after that deadline passed on Aug. 7, want the state to cancel the registration of some 225,000 voters based on false assertions of voter fraud and on what elections officials call a misunderstanding of state law and the misrepresentation of state voting data.

In one lawsuit, Republicans, with zero evidence, accused the North Carolina Board of Elections (NCBOE) of allowing hundreds of thousands of nonresidents to hide on the state’s voter rolls, even though a state database does not include their driver’s license or social security numbers as required. In the other suit, state and national Republicans said the board had “deliberately declined” to enforce a recent state law that requires officials to purge voter lists of anyone who got out of jury duty by claiming not to be a United States citizen. 

But Patrick Gannon, the NCBOE spokesman, said in a statement that the lawsuits, filed days apart, are “categorically false” and seek “an impossible solution.”

State and federal law already bar noncitizens from voting, and multiple studies over the years have shown that it is exceedingly rare that noncitizens successfully register to vote, much less actually cast a vote. 

The suggestion that state officials were turning a blind eye to mass voter fraud is “an entirely false premise,” Gannon said. 

No, elections officials did not ignore state law

North Carolina could be the deciding factor in the presidential election, and whichever way it tips, the vote is going to be close. Polls show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are virtually tied in the state, and Trump beat Biden in the state in 2020 by only 74,483 votes. 

Republicans’ lawsuits suggest they understand Trump is vulnerable in the state this year, as they are trying to both purge the rolls of rightful voters and perpetuate the baseless fear that many non-citizens are casting votes illegally. 

One of their lawsuits surrounds a law that went into effect this summer requiring elections officials to compare voter lists with the lists of potential jurors who said they weren’t citizens on state court questionnaires. The suit accuses the board of refusing to conduct that comparison and asks the court to force them to do so.

But the elections officials already complied with the state law, already got the documents from the courts, and made the comparison, Gannon said.

“State Board staff have worked diligently with the clerks of superior court across North Carolina since that provision became law in July,” Gannon said.

What did they find?

There are 7.6 million registered voters in North Carolina, and you could barely field a single baseball team with the number of people who had both told the courts they were noncitizens and had registered to vote.

“In August, the superior court clerks provided the State Board with lists of voters excused from jury duty because they claimed they were not U.S. citizens. The State Board compared those lists with the North Carolina voter rolls, and nine (9) individuals matched, across the state.”

The reality is that noncitizens are simply not voting in United States elections by any meaningful metric. A study of the 2016 election found only 30 incidents of non-citizen voting among the more than 23 million votes cast across the survey area. 

An effort to purge Florida voting rolls of noncitizens in 2012 started off with claims by state Republicans that more than 180,000 people had illegally registered. After a lengthy state review, only 80 non-citizens were found on the rolls.

Several studies have shown that among the handful of non-citizens who have registered to vote, the vast majority had done so mistakenly, not maliciously.

Second lawsuit ‘misunderstands the data’

In the second suit, Republicans say that 225,000 voters should be kicked off the rolls because the database does not include their driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their social security numbers.

This lack of information, Republicans say, is proof that noncitizens are trying to sway the election.

The reality is that there are many reasons that those details could be missing from the database, and the vast majority of voters disenfranchised by such a culling would be lawfully registered voters.

“If a voter does not have a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number populated in the voter registration database, that does not necessarily mean that they were allowed to register improperly,” Gannon said.

Sometimes missing database information is because of discrepancies between DMV and Social Security databases, and those discrepancies can be as simple as the difference between a maiden and married name.

So voters who changed their last names on their driver’s licenses after getting married would be among those 225,000 voters.

“These voters are also included in the plaintiffs’ alleged figures,” Gannon said.

Many voters also registered before those details were required, Gannon said, so many older voters would be among the 225,000.  

Sailor Jones, associate director of Common Cause North Carolina, told Ethic Media Services that he would be among those kicked off the rolls if the Republicans’ lawsuits prevail. He moved within North Carolina in 2022 and when he re-registered with his new address, his driver’s license and his social security number details no longer showed up in the state database. 

“I am one of hundreds of thousands eligible North Carolina voters whom extremists want to deny their freedom to cast a ballot just days before voting begins in our state,” Jones told the publication.

A false flag

The lawsuits are not about election integrity, voting rights advocates like Jones say. They are about trying to sway an election under a false flag of voter integrity.

They’re also part of a broader effort to stoke fears around noncitizens voting in elections. 

The Republican-controlled General Assembly placed a measure on the ballot in November seeking to amend the state constitution to prohibit nonresidents from voting, something state and federal law already do. 

The lawsuit, Gannon said, “misunderstands the data and vastly overstates any alleged problems with voter registrations.”

It also misunderstands the voting process, he added. Any voter with issues with their registration would still have to show ID and confirm their identity before they could actually vote. 

“Even if voters failed to provide either their driver’s license or last four digits of their Social Security numbers when they registered, just like voters whose information did not match between databases, those voters would have been required to show another type of ID before voting,” Gannon said. 

“In any event, all these voters will be asked to show photo ID again when they vote this year.”

You can look up your registration here to see if you are still active on the voter rolls.