Chief District Judge Richard Myers allowed another portion of a lawsuit to return to state courts, but wrote that ruling in favor of the GOP would essentially give judges and private citizens the power to cancel voter registrations based on mere accusations.
A federal judge last week dismissed part of a lawsuit filed by North Carolina Republicans that sought to purge 225,000 people from the state’s voter rolls just a few weeks before the election.
Republicans wanted the courts to either remove these voters from the rolls or make them cast a provisional ballot, accusing state election officials of violating a 2002 federal law requiring driver’s license or social security information to be recorded for every voter in the state’s registered voter databases.
The 225,000 voters at the center of the case had registered to vote using a form that did not clearly compel them to provide this information, and while election officials fixed the form, they did not contact those voters to confirm their identity, a decision that the lawsuit, with zero evidence, claimed opened the door for hundreds of thousands of non-citizens to vote.
US Chief District Judge Richard Myers broke the lawsuit into two parts, one pertaining to federal law, and the other claiming the board had also violated state law. He dismissed the federal portion but declined to rule on the state portion, sending it back to the state courts to resolve.
Myers, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, wrote in his ruling that if he sided with Republicans on removing these voters, it would essentially give judges and private citizens the power to unilaterally cancel voter registration based on a mere accusation. That, he wrote, quoting another court’s ruling in a similar case, would “significantly alter the allocation of power … away from a democratic form of government.”
And state law, he wrote, does not give individuals legal standing to sue over this particular issue in federal court.
This means these 225,000 voters, many of whom have likely already cast a ballot by mail or during the early voting period, which began on Thursday — the same day as the court hearing — will not have to jump through extra hoops in the 2024 election. But the state courts, which have Republican majorities in both the State Supreme and appellate courts, could address the issue ahead of the 2026 elections.
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 Joe Biden in the state in 2020 by only 74,483 votes.
A purge would have disenfranchised legal voters
A previous investigation had already shown the claims to be meritess, but that didn’t stop Republicans from filing suit.
Election officials claimed they did not need to reach out to these voters in question because they would still have to supply the information later in the voting process, bringing the state into compliance with the federal law.
The request to force the North Carolina Board of Elections (BOE) officials to remove these voters from the rolls sought “an impossible solution,” BOE officials said, because federal law prevents states from removing voters en masse less than 90 days before Election Day. Republicans, who were aware of the federal law, filed their suit after the Aug. 7 deadline.
And because it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and because several studies show that it is very rare for noncitizens to successfully register, much less actually cast their ballot, the vast majority of these 225,000 voters are likely legally registered, Patrick Gannon, the BOE spokesman said.
The reality is that there are many reasons that the driver’s license or social security information could be missing from the database.
“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.
Voter fraud is rare
Large scale voter fraud is very rare, it is even rarer for non-citizens to make it onto the voter rolls, and even more rare for them to successfully cast a vote.
A BOE investigation found that out of the state’s more than 7 million registered voters, only nine noncitizens were improperly on the voter rolls.
There is no evidence that any of these nine successfully cast a vote.
Based on what Gannon called “an entirely false premise,” the GOP lawsuit asked the court to force the Board of Elections to either remove the 225,000 voters from the rolls, or to require them to cast a provisional ballot at the polls and provide the necessary documents to prove they are registered legally.
But, state election officials have frequently pointed out, these voters would already have to provide a valid voter ID in order to successfully cast their ballot.
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