Hundreds of Thousands of Ineligible Voters Taken Off Rolls in North Carolina

North Carolina has removed nearly 750,000 ineligible voter records from its rolls in the past 20 months, or more than 1,200 per day, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said Thursday. 

The election board’s announcement also says that the board follows “careful policies” to ensure that only ineligible records are removed, not those of eligible voters, and spells out the reasons why registrants are removed.  

Those reasons include moving to a new location, inactive voter status, felony status, death, duplicate registration, requests to be removed, or lack of citizenship.  

“North Carolina election officials should be commended for taking the steps necessary to guarantee the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls by removing individuals who have died, moved out of state, been convicted of a felony, or otherwise become ineligible to vote,” says Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, adding:

By doing so, they are protecting the franchise of the voters of North Carolina from being diluted and offset by invalid votes. But election officials are also complying with the requirements of federal law that require states to have accurate voter registration lists.  

Von Spakovsky served two years as a member of the Federal Election Commission, the agency that enforces federal campaign finance laws and oversees public funding for presidential campaigns. Von Spakovsky was also appointed to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 by then-President Trump, according to The Washington Post. 

The North Carolina election board’s announcement says that the most common reason why voter registrants were removed from the rolls is due to moving to another address, with nearly 290,000 registrants being removed for that reason among the more than 747,000 total. The second leading reason for removal is that some voters hold an “inactive status,” with 33% of registrants falling into that category.  

An “inactive status” indicates that the registrants have skipped voting in at least two general federal elections and did not respond to their county board of election’s attempts to contact them, according to the state board.  

The deaths of registrants account for more than 17% of those removed from the rolls.  

The announcement of the removal of registrants comes after North Carolina residents’ complaints about voter registration forms neglecting to require a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, according to a late August lawsuit filed by North Carolina Republicans.  

The lawsuit was filed by the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party, which said in the document that the state had failed to act on complaints about ineligible people remaining on voter rolls. 

The state election board says that North Carolina has nearly 7.7 million registered voters.  

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