North Carolina election board flags hundreds of thousands of voters for potential disenfranchisement

North Carolina’s GOP-controlled election board announced Tuesday it’s sending letters to hundreds of thousands of voters whose registrations were flagged in a database review — a move that puts them at risk of disenfranchisement.

The letters are going to more than 241,000 North Carolina voters whose driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers did not match when checked against government databases, according to the state board.

“This is just another way we are working to have the most accurate voter rolls in North Carolina history,” Sam Hayes, the board’s executive director, said. “This effort does not affect the eligibility of any of these voters to cast ballots in our elections.”

The letters are being sent under a newly GOP-controlled elections board, reshaped by a law stripping appointment power from the Democratic governor and handing it to the Republican state auditor. Hayes, a GOP operative and former top lawyer for the Republican speaker of the state House, was appointed executive director last year after the board removed a longtime nonpartisan administrator.

The voters receiving these letters overlap significantly with the group affected by the state’s so-called Registration Repair Project, launched after the U.S. Department of Justice sued North Carolina last year for allegedly failing to properly collect required identification information on voter registration forms. 

That dispute involves voters whose records were missing or incomplete because the state’s own forms did not clearly indicate that certain information was required

Under the repair project, about 98,000 voters could be forced to cast provisional ballots if they fail to provide additional information — a process that can result in votes being tossed if follow-up steps are missed.

The new round of letters expands the scope of voters being flagged, this time focusing on people who did provide identification numbers but whose information did not match exactly with other databases. The board explicitly acknowledged that mismatches are often caused by minor discrepancies such as hyphens, apostrophes, name changes or typos, rather than any issue with eligibility.

“For the voters who receive letters, this process did not result in a match,” the board said in its announcement. “During elections, affected voters will be asked if they want to update their information at their voting site. They will still vote regular ballots even if they do not update their information, unless there is another reason they must vote a provisional ballot.”

Still, for many voters and advocates, the assurances ring hollow. 

These are some of the same voters whose ballots were targeted by Republican Jefferson Griffin last year in a failed attempt to overturn his loss to Democratic Justice Allison Riggs on the state Supreme Court. A federal court rejected Griffin’s challenge, but the episode underscored how registration technicalities can be weaponized to try to discard lawful votes.

In recent months, Hayes pressed the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles for access to voters’ full Social Security numbers in an effort to “maintain the most accurate voter rolls possible.”

Hayes also has outlined restrictive new voting legislation he wants lawmakers to pass.