NORTH CAROLINA (LifeSiteNews) — An election integrity group has flagged more than 60,000 different voter registrations in North Carolina ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) identified 7,933 dead North Carolinians “still registered to vote long after death in 2020” and released the results in a March 29 report.
“Time is quickly running out for North Carolina’s voter registration rolls to be checked and cleaned before the midterm elections,” PILF stated in its report. “All eyes are on an open U.S. Senate race amid the state’s recent record of strong turnout and tight margins.”
The legal foundation also identified “42,984 North Carolina voter registrants [who] left the state and established or renewed their out-of-state voter registration before the 2020 Election.”
Its analysis flagged “13,525 North Carolinians [who] managed to become registered twice in North Carolina under variations of their name.”
PILF’s report relied on public data, including the Social Security Death Index and “the U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address (NCOA) system and the organization’s national voter database” to create a list of questionable voter registrations.
The election integrity group suggested reforms the state could take to clean up its voter rolls and prevent fraudulent votes, such as creating “interstate compacts” to track voters who move to or die outside of North Carolina.
The foundation spoke to election officials to figure out how people could be registered under variations of the same name – for example, some people are registered using their first name and middle initial and their first name and their middle name. PILF found that election officials can quickly make these fixes by doing a simple merge of the a list of voters.
“PILF spoke with county election officials about sampled findings to get a broader
sense as to how duplicates are generated locally,” the reported stated. “Essentially, when a person engages voter registration applications via different pathways (e.g., motor vehicle offices vs. third-party voter drives) and omits personal identifying information or PII (like the optional partial Social Security number), there is a decent chance of a faulty copy being created in the process,” PILF found.
“Administrative fixes such as these can legally occur up to the final days before the election without a federal safe harbor protection,” the group stated in its report.
“In North Carolina, officials take all of the correct elements of a duplicate set and ‘merge’ them into a single record. With a side-by-side review, officials can complete the cleanup immediately without the registrant’s involvement,” the report stated.
“There is essentially no risk of an eligible registrant losing their ability to vote during the process. The process is quick enough that it was even performed in real-time with PILF’s sampling in Cabarrus County.” The legal foundation reported in that county there is a “dedicated staffer is specifically tasked with clearing duplicate registrations.”
The registration errors raise concerns about the use of mail-in balloting, the group stated. It urged election officials to correct the problems now.
“North Carolina officials need to use the time they still have to prepare voter rolls for the midterm elections,” President J. Christian Adams stated. “Time is running out. Silly, obvious errors in the voter roll can create opportunities for voter fraud and chaos in a close election.”
“Correcting deceased and duplicate records now will help to preemptively address those risks,” Adams stated.
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