Republicans from across the country and across North Carolina filed two lawsuits last month to get rid of hundreds of thousands of people who they say were registered illegally from the state’s voting rolls.
The charges were sent to Wake County Superior Court by the Republican National Committee and the NC GOP. They are worried that noncitizens or people who aren’t allowed to vote could change the outcome of the November election.
But some of the GOP’s claims are false or exaggerated, and they want to find an answer that is against federal law.
The head of the Institute For Responsive Government, Sam Oliker-Friedland, which studies election policy, called the cases “frankly, a political play… disguised as a legal strategy.”
The News & Observer looked at what the RNC was suing for and how it related to state and federal rules that were already in place.
What do the lawsuits claim?
The first case says that the North Carolina State Board of Elections did not properly set up a way to remove people who are not citizens from the list of people who can vote.
A new law that was passed last year says that the board has to work with state courts to look over the answers to jury questionnaires. The board needs to know the name of any possible juror who is excused because they say they are not a citizen. This is because they need to use that information to keep the state’s voter rolls up to date.
It wasn’t until July 1 of this year that that part of the law became law. The lawsuit says the board hasn’t done enough to put it into action and start canceling the voting registrations of anyone who is found to not be a citizen.
In the second case, the claims are bigger. It says the board did something wrong when it let 225,000 people register to vote without giving the necessary proof of identity.
That’s why the RNC wants the court to tell the state to take all of those people off the rolls, so they can’t vote just months before Election Day.
Can the State Board of Elections remove the disputed voters from the rolls?
No, because of federal law.
The National Voter Registration Act says that states can’t remove voters one by one in the 90 days before an election. That due date was August 7.
When this time is over, the board can do large-scale list maintenance procedures. It was too late for the RNC to file its complaints.
Are noncitizens able to vote in NC elections?
Government and state laws say no.
It is against the law in North Carolina and the United States for people who are not Americans to register to vote.
Noncitizen voting has become a big issue for Republicans across the country, but there is no evidence that it is a big problem for most people.
The conservative Heritage Foundation looked at all of the votes that happened in the United States from 2003 to 2023 and found that 24 people who were not citizens voted.
The liberal Brennan Center did a different study that found 30 cases of people who were thought to not be citizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast in certain areas during the 2016 election.
Noncitizens can’t register to vote because of a number of protections. However, even if they could, they would still have to show a photo ID at the voting place. If they didn’t have one and instead filled out an ID exception form, county election officials would look over their registration and might not let them vote.
Has the State Board implemented the jury list law to remove noncitizens from the rolls?
Yes, according to the State Board of Elections and the Administrative Office of the Courts.
A board spokesman, Pat Gannon, said that since the law went into effect on July 1, staff have worked with superior court workers all over the state. The board has used this method to find nine people on the voting rolls who asked not to serve on the jury because they said they were not citizens.
He said that the board would send those people letters telling them what they found and asking them to cancel their voter registrations to follow the law if a check of state and federal files confirmed that those people are not citizens.
Due to the deadline set by the federal voter registration act, the board cannot properly take those people off the list right now.
AOC spokesman Graham Wilson stated that the board worked with them and the court clerks to make this law work.
Matt Mercer, communications director for the NC GOP, said that the board could have avoided the deadline for removing voters set by the Voter Registration Act if it had moved faster to put the law into effect.
Are there 225,000 ineligible voters on NC’s voter rolls?
Almost certainly not.
A subset of North Carolina voter records were used to get this number. These registrations do not include a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
An important part of the RNC’s case is that the state used a voter registration form for a while that didn’t make it clear that one of these two types of ID was needed.
On its own, this doesn’t mean that all 225,000 of those registrants don’t have one of those types of ID, and there are many reasons why that information might not be in the database.
The federal Help America Vote Act is the law that says you need those kinds of ID to vote. Since that law was passed in 2002, some people may have signed up before it became law.
It’s also possible that a county election worker made a mistake and didn’t put that information into the system, even though it was on the paper form.
It has also been reported that Social Security numbers don’t match up correctly when they are checked against national databases for reasons that aren’t the registrant’s fault.
This means that even if one of these voters didn’t have ID and couldn’t vote because of that, they would still be asked to show ID at the voting place.
But in its case, the RNC asks a court to tell the board to cancel all 225,000 of these voters’ registrations right away. As was already said, the National Voter Registration Act makes this illegal.
There are too many protections in place, Oliker-Friedland said, to even think about a voting purge like this.
“I think that 225,000 people losing their voting rights because of a mistake made by a clerk that wasn’t their fault is way too much,” he said. “…it would just mean that people can’t vote because they don’t have the right paperwork, which isn’t fair.”
October 11 is the last day to sign up to vote in the 2024 election.
Why did the RNC and NC GOP file these lawsuits?
It changes who you ask.
The RNC and NC GOP say the lawsuits are meant to protect the purity of the election and lower the risk of fraud.
In a statement last month, NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said, “This state board always has trouble making sure that voter rolls only have verified citizens.” “This lawsuit will stop them from refusing to get the information they need from people who want to vote in North Carolina elections.”
Right away, civil rights groups said the cases were attempts to spread conspiracy theories and set the stage for claims of meddling in the election.
The Southern Coalition for Social Justice said in a statement, “The NC GOP have again asked a state court for help that would clearly violate federal law.
They are doing this based on a conspiracy theory that North Carolina’s voter rolls hide hundreds of thousands of illegal voters from view.” “These cases should be seen for what they are: dishonest attempts to cause trouble and doubt that hurt North Carolinians’ right to vote.”
The North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP has asked to be a part of the case.
“Voters from marginalized groups across this state have been consistently targeted through the abuse of our elections,” said Deborah Maxwell, head of the NC NAACP, in a statement.
“We stand by what our mission statement says: to protect the political rights of Black and brown voters. We will not let the actions of the North Carolina Republican Party and the RNC keep eligible voters from voting, which is what they want to do.”
Oliker-Friedland said the lawsuit was part of a trend that started in 2020 of “getting ready arguments for false claims that the election was stolen.”