Feds sue North Carolina over voter registration issues

RALEIGH, N.C. (CN) — The Trump administration sued the North Carolina State Board of Elections on Tuesday, claiming the board violated federal voting law in its handling of voter registration records before the 2024 elections.

The state’s election board violated the Help America Vote Act, the Department of Justice said, by using a voter registration form that did not require voters to provide their driver’s license number or last four digits of a Social Security number. This information is required to confirm the voting eligibility of U.S. citizens under federal voting laws. Registrants were then added to the state’s voter registration roll, the DOJ said, without their identifying information being confirmed.

“The cornerstone of public trust in government lies in free and fair elections,” the government wrote. “The core of the compact between a state and its citizens rests in ensuring that only eligible citizens can vote in elections.”

The form that the state used, the government said, did not make it clear to registrants that they were required to provide identifying information: required fields had red text, but the boxes for a driver’s license number or the last four of a Social Security number were printed in black. The board also didn’t contact voters who registered using this form to update their information in advance of the 2024 election.

“Accurate voter registration rolls are critical to ensure that elections in North Carolina are conducted fairly, accurately and without fraud,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “The Department of Justice will not hesitate to file suit against jurisdictions that maintain inaccurate voter registration rolls in violation of federal voting laws.”

The government asked the court to require the elections board to develop a plan to contact and update the information of all registered voters who are missing information in the state’s voter rolls. It also requested that the government then be provided a complete list of corrected records.

The state board of elections is still reviewing the complaint, said Sam Hayes, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. The political majority of the board recently flipped from Democratic to Republican control, after being controlled by the party of the governor for over a century.

“Rest assured that I am committed to bringing North Carolina into compliance with federal law,” Hayes said.

Carol Snow, a leader of a small conservative activist group called North Carolina Audit Force, contacted the state board of elections in 2023, complaining that the board wasn’t HAVA compliant because of the color differences in the form. Counsel for the elections board agreed that the form was “somewhat confusing” but said in November of 2023 that it was already in the process of revamping the form and asked county election boards to update missing information on an ad hoc basis. The government’s suit closely aligns with her complaint.

“The law’s purpose of identifying the registrant upon initial registration is already accomplished because any voter who did not provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number would have had to provide additional documentation to prove their identity before being allowed to vote,” said Alan Hirsch, the former chair, in the board’s decision over Snow’s complaint.

“No one who lacked this information when registering since the enactment of HAVA would have been allowed to vote without proving their identity consistent with HAVA.”

Missing information in the state’s voter roll database played a factor in a recent dispute over a state Supreme Court associate justice seat, where Judge Jefferson Griffin claimed that tens of thousands of voters who cast ballots in his race could have been ineligible to vote. Attorneys for the state board of elections argued at the time that missing information was due to several factors, including forms being imputed incorrectly by clerks and the system deleting mismatched identifying information.

Several courts toyed with requiring voters to cure their ballots and prove their voting eligibility post-election — despite Griffin being unable to prove that any of these voters were ineligible to vote — before a federal court ruled that instituting a cure process or removing ballots would be unconstitutional.

The government’s lawsuit nodded toward doubts brought up by Griffin’s challenges that there may be immigrants and felons voting in elections who are ineligible to vote despite North Carolina requiring photo ID at the polls. A “significant number” of voters were registered without providing information, the government said.

It also noted President Donald Trump’s executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to ensure all states are complying with voter list requirements laid out by federal laws.

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