The passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002 was intended to highlight the importance of election integrity in the United States. But North Carolina’s failure to adhere to the requirements of this bill is now under scrutiny, due to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday against the state and the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) by the US Department of Justice.
At issue is the requirement to include the last four digits of Social Security numbers, or at least driver’s license numbers, for each newly registered voter. For a time, North Carolina failed to require these “HAVA numbers” on forms despite the law.
“We are hopeful that the DOJ will force the North Carolina election administrators to follow the law and to remedy all of these registrations that lack any sort of personally identifying information,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told Carolina Journal Wednesday in an exclusive interview.
The suit accuses the elections board of failing to maintain an accurate voter list, violating the federal Help America Vote Act.
It specifically references the elections board’s use of a voter registration form that did not require prospective voters to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
pushback from citizens throwS spotlight on nc voter roll issues
“It all started because of citizens just pushing on a problem,” he told CJ. He said the state told voters that that information has been optional since 2004.
DeLancy said the whole process started when one of Carol Snow’s friends noticed that it said it was optional to provide the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number or a driver’s license number on North Carolina’s voter registration form, which clearly violated HAVA.
Snow filed a complaint with NCSBE in 2023, which discussed the matter at its Nov. 28, 2023, meeting. The meeting was referenced in the lawsuit.
She said the form didn’t comply with those requirements.
Officials said they were already in the process of revamping the voter registration form, and this was one of the items they were looking at because there was an inconsistency between the way the HAVA ID question is presented to voters and the way that the federal statute reads.
The board, which consisted of then Democrat chairman Alan Hirsch and members Democrats Siobhan Millen and Jeff Carmon and Republicans Stacy “Four” Eggers IV and Kevin Lewis, unanimously agreed that the form violated Section 303 of HAVA and would implement changes already being discussed to the form.
However, they rejected Snow’s second request to contact the over 200,000 voters to get their identifying information, all of which was mentioned in Tuesday’s lawsuit.
“In December 2023, the state board refused to correct the records on any of them, but they did agree to change the form, and they still accepted another 61,718 that were deficient in that information,” DeLancy said. “They didn’t even go back to those voters, where normally the law says if you submit a registration form that is incomplete, they’re [the board] supposed to send it back to you and have you complete the form. They didn’t do that, they just went ahead and accepted them anyway, so even though the state board admitted to the public that their form was incorrect, and they changed the form, they still continued to process applications as if it was optional.”
He told CJ that at its peak after November’s General Election, there were 502,914 registered voters without a driver’s license or a Social Security number associated with their voting record — about 250,000 before the HAVA requirements took place and about the same number after.
In 2024, Snow filed a new complaint, charging that the verification process of a registrants’ driver’s license and Social Security number didn’t go far enough.
“So, it occurs to me that one way for state elections officials to avoid or circumvent HAVA’s required verification step is by not requiring this ID on their application,” she said at their June 2024 meeting. “It shouldn’t be too much to ask for elections officials, elections board members, and the general counsel of the State Board of Elections to know the HAVA Act like they know their own names and to adhere to it.”
The NCSBE would go on to vote 4-1 against her complaint.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the North Carolina Republican Party (NCGOP) would follow up soon after with a lawsuit against the NCSBE. The lawsuit said the election board failed to require identification to prove citizenship by not requiring HAVA-required identification information.
Ongoing concerns of invalid voter registrations related to ACORN
There have been other concerns about election integrity in the state as well.
According to DeLancy, in 2008, about 150 individuals were identified in North Carolina with fictional voter registrations created by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which was shut down in 2010 over allegations of voter fraud.
“We have worried ever since then, we as my group, the Voter Integrity Project, this has been a thing we’ve worried about for a long time, wondering, are those people voting the ones they didn’t catch?” he said. “There were people who were registered innocently that didn’t provide the information, and there were others who were either not citizens who truly don’t have a driver’s license and Social Security number, or they were fictional voters brought in during that era, what I call the ACORN era of fictional voter registrations.”
DeLancy mentions “innocent voters” in an amicus brief he filed in the recent Jefferson Griffin-Allison Riggs case, in which Griffin wanted 65,000 ballots cast in the general election thrown out.
His brief would have disqualified votes that never should have been counted in the 2024 state Supreme Court election without threatening most of the 65,000 ballots targeted by Griffin.
“They said, which side are you for; and we said neither,” he said. “We just want the state board of elections to do what they should have done a year ago, and you can require them, the court had the wherewithal they could have done this, and in my view, they could have ordered the state board to conduct the list maintenance mailing on all 60,000 of the people who voted in that election and to require that information. And it would have been messy because some of them would have been gone. We were just happy to see it was just the perfect race to show that this issue cuts both ways for both parties.”
The General Assembly has also worked on and passed election integrity laws in the past few years, including in 2023, SB 747, Election Law Changes; and SB 749, No Partisan Advantage in Elections.
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