DOJ and North Carolina Collude to Tighten Voting Rules
On May 27, two weeks after Republicans took control of North Carolina’s elections, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the new Board of Elections.
The lawsuit demands that the board move more quickly to address minor flaws with voter registration information — a process that advocates fear could lead to a massive voter purge.
But the case is unusual because the ostensible defendant, the board, says it supports the plaintiff’s goal of fixing the problem. The lawsuit represents a new and troubling Trump administration tactic: Filing lawsuits in cases where the plaintiff and defendant are aligned, allowing for sweeping policy changes that don’t go through the political process.
The North Carolina lawsuit argues that some voter registrations, possibly hundreds of thousands, don’t comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. These registrations don’t include the last four digits of an identifying number, such as a driver’s license or social security number, the complaint charges. If the argument sounds familiar, that’s because it echoes the lawsuit from former North Carolina Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin, the Republican who tried to steal the election by having courts toss tens of thousands of ballots.
Sam Hayes, the new executive director of the elections board, agreed with the administration’s interpretation of federal law. Hayes, who helped write the law that gave the GOP control of the board when he worked as a top legislative aide, said “the failure to collect the information … has been well documented” and promised to bring the state into compliance. The DOJ wants the board to demand that these voters, who could number in the hundreds of thousands, supply the information within 30 days. If they don’t provide the numbers in the time frame that the DOJ and the board settle on, Hayes and his colleagues could potentially cancel their registrations.
To be sure, the lawsuit stops short of asserting that voters should be immediately purged — instead it wants the board to have to contact the voters who have missing information. But it makes sense to be wary. As North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton warned, “We’re not dealing with people that have real interest in enfranchising people.”
Republican legislators also agree with the DOJ lawsuit. State House Speaker Destin Hall suggested the board would cooperate with the DOJ and called for “clean voter rolls.” Senate Leader Phil Berger, a Republican who fought for a decade to have his party take over the elections board, called on the new board “to clean up the voter rolls.”
Something similar happened in Texas last week. Both the Trump administration and GOP state leaders wanted to get rid of a state law that allowed undocumented residents to pay in-state tuition at state universities. So the DOJ simply filed a lawsuit to scrap the law, and the state quickly settled.
In 2020, North Carolina Republicans accused the Democratic-led elections board of something similar. As GOP lawmakers in swing states fought tooth and nail to make it harder to vote during a pandemic, North Carolina legislators accused the elections board of colluding with lawyers representing voters to undermine election integrity. Hall, who wasn’t yet Speaker at the time, said the board was colluding with “DC Democrats to undermine election laws the General Assembly recently passed in a bipartisan manner.”
Now that the GOP controls the board, they don’t seem to mind colluding with D.C. Republicans to change election laws. Meanwhile, the DOJ benefits by getting an easy win, and by seeming to deliver on the Trump administration’s promise to supporters to tighten voting rules.
Now that the GOP controls the board, they don’t seem to mind colluding with D.C. Republicans to change election laws.
Indeed, the move comes as the department is transforming its Civil Rights Division into yet another weapon for persecuting Trump’s political enemies, and making voting harder, rather than protecting voting rights. The Attorney General, for example, recently hired a lawyer dedicated to election denialism and voter suppression to lead the Voting Section.
Republicans seem to think they can win by changing the rules after an election or making it harder to vote. And Trump’s DOJ wants to help them do it.
Billy Corriher is the state courts manager for People’s Parity Project and a longtime advocate for fair courts and progressive judges. As a Democracy Docket contributor, Billy writes about voting and election state court cases in North Carolina and across the country.