New Republican election officials make voting harder in North Carolina 

Republicans have spent their first year back in power ramping up attacks on voting. In North Carolina, GOP-led election boards have shut down early voting sites across the state and sent personal voter data to the Trump administration, which is running the information through a federal database to find non-citizens who shouldn’t be voting.

Since the administration revamped the SAVE database to focus on voting, nearly 50 million voter registrations have been analyzed. Harmeet Dillon, a 2020 election denier who spent much of her career attacking voting rights and now leads the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, claimed that the process has unearthed “several thousand noncitizens who are enrolled to vote.” But the states that announced their results only found a few dozen examples each. 

The SAVE system has big problems. It has flagged citizens who lawfully voted, and states have demanded that these lawful voters must prove their citizenship if they want to keep voting. And a federal judge, hearing a privacy lawsuit challenging the program, expressed doubts that SAVE in its current form is even lawful. 

Despite these systemic issues with SAVE, Republican members of the North Carolina elections board promptly signed on when they took control earlier this year. Now, the board is demanding that the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) provide people’s full social security numbers, instead of just the last four digits.

Local election boards are also taking steps that will make it harder for young voters to cast their ballots.

Democratic board members voted against the plan, warning the data could be leaked or used for other nefarious purposes, such as immigration enforcement. Board member Siobahn Millen said, “They’re saying ‘We’re going to help you scrub your [voter] rolls,’ but they’re also saying, ‘We might use it for some other kind of enforcement’ that—I’m sorry—I don’t trust those people.”

The board was already in the midst of cleaning up voter registrations that lacked the identifying numbers (social security or driver’s license) required by federal law. They reached out to 74,000 voters so far, as part of a settlement with the DOJ, which sued over the missing numbers. GOP board members had initially planned to purge these voters if they didn’t promptly fix their registrations, but they relaxed the requirements after Democrats sued. Many of these voters, tens of thousands, had their ballots challenged last year by a losing judicial candidate who tried to steal the election. 

Local election boards are also taking steps that will make it harder for young voters to cast their ballots. As they prepare for the March 2026 primary election, some Republican board members have taken aim at early voting on college campuses. Students are already dealing with a new voting law, passed at the behest of anti-voting activists like Cleta Mitchell, that will make it harder for them to use same-day registration. And the state board in July banned digital student IDs as a way to comply with the state’s voter ID mandate.

Students at two colleges in the city of Greensboro, including the largest HBCU in the country, traveled to the Guilford County Board of Elections to ask for new early voting sites on their campuses. Democratic board member Carolyn Bunker asked that the students be allowed to speak. “Our decisions today must reflect commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and the belief that every voter, regardless of where they live, deserves a convenient and accessible opportunity to participate in your government,” she said.

The students weren’t allowed to speak. Board chair Eugene Lester, speaking one block away from the site where students at that HBCU launched the “sit-in” movement to protest racial segregation in 1960, responded to the students’ concerns by describing voting as a privilege, not a right. 

The Guilford County Board of Elections voted against the campus sites. And Republican board members in Cumberland County rejected a Democrat’s proposal to add an early voting site across the street from Fayetteville State University, another HBCU.

But recent moves by the state board suggest they’re likely on board with the Republican voter suppression agenda.

Some voters in the Western part of the state, where infrastructure is still being rebuilt from a devastating 2024 hurricane, could find it harder to vote early next year. The Jackson County election board recently voted to close an early voting site at Western Carolina University, deep in the mountains. Chris Cooper, a professor at the school, warned that the closure will reduce turnout for students. Cooper noted that these sites had seen some of the highest rates of same-day registrations in the state. 

In nearby Madison County, the GOP-led board actually wants to expand early voting at an established site on a community college campus, but they’re shutting down the county’s other early voting sites to do it. 

Democrats voted no on most of these changes, and the non-unanimous local board decisions must be reviewed by the state board. But recent moves by the state board suggest they’re likely on board with the Republican voter suppression agenda. The board chair, a former lawyer for GOP leaders in the legislature, has hired other legislative lawyers and staffers to run elections. 

Dallas Woodhouse, former head of the state GOP, will serve as the liaison to local election boards. Though he now claims to support early voting, Woodhouse emailed local election boards in 2016 and demanded that they slash early voting. After Election Day, the then-head of the state GOP bragged about decreased Black voter turnout and increased “caucasian” turnout. 

North Carolina’s elections are being run by partisan Republicans. And as local election officials prepare for the 2026 general election, voters should keep a close eye on their local boards. There’s a reason why North Carolina fought so hard for a decade to control elections, and it wasn’t to help voters.

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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.