(The Center Square) – The Registration Repair Project will not cause eligible voters to be removed from voter rolls, North Carolina’s executive director of the State Board of Elections said Thursday.
Sam Hayes, mired in litigation from the U.S. Department of Justice less than two weeks after beginning his post, and the new five-member board are unscrambling problems in execution from the last board and former Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell. Three pending lawsuits involve missing information for voters, and a settlement proposal adopted by the state board involves fixing issues.
“This project will not result in the removal of any eligible voter from the voter rolls, as some have inaccurately suggested,” Hayes said. “Instead, it will result in cleaner, more complete voter rolls and full compliance with state and federal laws. We have gone to great lengths to make this process as straightforward and transparent as possible for the affected voters. We fully expect the number of voters on the list will decrease quickly.”
Help America Vote Act, colloquially called HAVA, is a significant part. In addition, state law requires identifying information such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. About 100,000 registered voters fall into that category of missing information.
State board forms used previously and the voters with missing information were central to the prolonged decision going through the North Carolina state courts, including the Wake County Superior Court and the state Court of Appeals, before being ultimately decided by a federal judge six months after Election Day.
Both federal and North Carolina law requires the identifying information at the time a person registers to vote, the State Board of Elections said Thursday.
“However, faulty instructions on a voter registration form used in North Carolina for about a decade led some voters to register without providing either number,” the board said in a statement Thursday. “The voter registration form was corrected in January 2024 to make it clear that one of those numbers is required.”
The Registration Repair Project has a website allowing voters to check to see if that state has the proper identifying information on them. It also provides three options for how voters can supply the required information.
In August, the state will send letters and forms to voters who still have missing information and instructions on how to add the data on the state portal.
In future elections, voters who still have not provided the missing information, will have to cast provisional ballots and provide the required identification numbers when they vote, the state said.
Bell was to become president of the National Elections Association. Her ouster nixed that. Also gone are former board Chairman Alan Hirsch, a Democrat; and Republican Kevin Lewis.
Board members who remain are Republican Stacy Eggers and Democrats Jeff Carmon and Siobhan Millen. Republican Francis DeLuca is the chairman, and Bob Rucho is the other newcomer.
