The North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and an individual voter seek to intervene in a lawsuit Republican groups filed against the State Board of Elections. The suit challenges the way elections officials handled registration for 225,000 voters.
The NAACP and voter Jackson Sailor Jones filed a motion Wednesday to intervene in the case. The Democratic National Committee filed a similar request Friday.
“Plaintiffs seek to quickly force Defendants to identify and remove approximately 225,000 North Carolinian voters from the state’s voter registration rolls less than sixty-five days before the 2024 presidential election,” NAACP lawyers wrote. “Plaintiffs’ request, on the eve of the impending General Election, is unprecedented and improper. The action is founded on the unsupported belief that every one of these 225,000 voters is ‘ineligible’ because they allegedly did not include their driver’s license number or Social Security number on their voter registration forms when registering to vote.”
“The notion that these voters are ‘unlawfully’ registered to vote and therefore must be purged is patently false,” the NAACP’s motion continued. “The exclusion of this information from many individuals’ voter registration forms is largely due to a simple fact — until December 2023, North Carolina’s voter registration forms made this information optional rather than mandatory. This cannot and does not justify purging individual voters, who would find themselves kicked off of the rolls through no fault of their own.”
The DNC offered similar arguments in a court filing Friday.
“They seek to disenfranchise 225,000 North Carolinians not because those voters did anything wrong, but because — according to them — small portions of North Carolina’s approved voter registration form were improperly color-coded,” Democratic lawyers wrote. “Their claims are unsupported by state or federal law, and their request to disenfranchise voters on the eve of an election is expressly prohibited by the National Voter Registration Act.”
The lawsuit filed in August argues that the elections board failed to require identification from prospective voters to prove citizenship. The Republican National Committee and North Carolina Republican Party said that by violating the Help America Vote Act and not checking the identification of approximately 225,000 voters, the agency opened the door for noncitizens to vote.
According to the suit, the NCSBE formerly used a voter registration form that failed to require HAVA-required identification information, such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
Before December 2023, NCSBE used voter registration forms that failed to collect this required information. Specifically, NCSBE collected, processed, and accepted voter registration applications that lacked both the driver’s license and Social Security numbers because NCSBE’s form did not tell the voter the information was required.
The lawsuit argues that the state board’s noncompliance with HAVA was first raised when a concerned citizen, Carol Snow, filed a complaint on Oct. 6, 2023.
Snow alleged that NCSBE’s voter registration form, which was still in use at the time of her filing, failed to indicate that “the applicant’s qualifying identification of the applicant’s driver’s license number or last four digits of the applicant’s social security number, is required if one or the other have been issued to the applicant.”
At its meeting on Nov. 28, 2023, NCSBE considered Snow’s complaint. At the meeting, and in its Dec. 6, 2023, order, NCSBE acknowledged that its voter registration forms did not sufficiently notify applicants that their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number were required for their registration to be processed and accepted.
NCSBE further acknowledged using the voter registration form, which failed to comply with HAVA, for approximately 225,000 voters throughout North Carolina. The board granted Snow’s request to change the voter registration form moving forward. It denied Snow’s request to identify and contact voters whose registrations were improperly accepted.
Snow filed a new complaint earlier this year charging that the verification process of registrants’ driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers didn’t go far enough.
The board voted 4-1 against the complaint.
The RNC and NCGOP said the board “has refused to take remedial action and did not reach out to these voters to collect the required information. The agency has offered a half-hearted promise to North Carolinians that those ineligible to register, but were allowed to anyways, will naturally filter themselves out.”
Elections board spokesman Patrick Gannon told Carolina Journal in an emailed statement that the lawsuit asked for an impossible solution, adding that despite being aware of their alleged claims months ago, the plaintiffs waited until two weeks before the start of voting to seek a court-ordered program to remove thousands of existing registered voters.
“Federal law itself prevents such removal programs if they take place after the 90th day before a federal election, which was August 7,” he told CJ. “So, the lawsuit is asking for a rapid-fire voter removal program that violates federal law.”
Gannon also said that the lawsuit also misunderstands the data and vastly overstates any alleged problems with voter registrations.
The RNC and NCGOP filed a separate suit claiming that state election officials are ignoring a 2023 state law requiring removal from the voting rolls of noncitizens identified through jury questionnaires.
