North Carolina GOPers’ latest suppression scheme: Sending voter data to Trump administration

By Billy Corriher

North Carolina voters could be forced to prove their citizenship at the ballot box this November. Republicans claim the new process is another “election integrity” measure, but they’re once again risking the rights of eligible voters to address a problem that barely exists. 

Last week, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted 3-2 along party lines to send the state’s voter registration information to the Department of Homeland Security, which will run it through the SAVE database to check voters’ citizenship status. The SAVE system is riddled with erroneous information and has mistakenly flagged thousands of eligible voters as noncitizens. In Boone County, Missouri, for example, half of the 74 people flagged as noncitizens were actually citizens.

An audit of the 2016 election in North Carolina found only 41 noncitizen voters, who were all legally in the United States and erroneously told that they could register. The elections board acknowledged on Friday that it has no evidence to suggest that noncitizen voting is a “widespread problem.” 

The board’s decision is just the latest voter suppression tactic from North Carolina Republicans. Bryan Kennedy of the advocacy group Democracy North Carolina called it “a deliberate effort to strip lawful voters of their freedom to vote, right before an election that has clear implications on the future of our democracy.”

Voting rights advocates worry that this flawed process will cause thousands of registered voters to face unnecessary hurdles, such as proving their citizenship to local election boards controlled by Republicans. Advocates also warned that challenges to voter registrations may have a disproportionate impact on women, who are more likely to change their last names and will therefore face additional challenges finding documentation to prove their citizenship.

Republicans may actually want voters to face new obstacles on their way to casting a ballot. 

Republicans are well aware that noncitizens rarely vote, and that those who do were typically misled by registration officials about their eligibility. Yet Republicans persist in their quixotic quest to search out “illegal” voters. 

Why? Because Republicans may actually want voters to face new obstacles on their way to casting a ballot. 

Voters whose registrations are challenged will have to show up at a hearing and present local election officials with a birth certificate, passport, or other evidence of their citizenship or their parents’ citizenship. Many voters likely won’t make it to the hearing or won’t have the papers now required to participate in their democracy. 

In a state where recent supreme court elections have been decided by 401 and 734 votes, it wouldn’t take that many disenfranchised voters to impact election outcomes. 

For many North Carolinians, the new challenges will be just the latest obstacle that Republicans have erected at the polls. The 2024 elections were the first statewide elections in which a voter ID mandate was in effect. Nearly 7,000 voters didn’t have the required ID and had to cast provisional ballots, and more than one-third of those ballots ultimately didn’t count. 

This was the result of North Carolina Republicans’ decade-long quest for a voter ID mandate. Their first effort in 2013 was a bill that was literally designed to disenfranchise Black people. Republicans had asked the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) for data on ID possession, broken down by race, and designed the bill to impact Black voters. This bill was struck down by federal courts for targeting Black citizens “with almost surgical precision.” 

In 2018, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a new voter ID law, which was later upheld by the state supreme court. 

With their voter ID mandate secure, Republicans are now taking the next step in disenfranchisement with this search for noncitizens. 

 And they have a presidential administration that backs their pointless effort to root out ineligible voters — the same administration that is pushing federal voter suppression and threatening to arrest people in connection with their 2020 election conspiracy. 

One thing is clear: In both Raleigh and Washington, D.C., none of this is actually about election integrity. It’s about voter suppression and influencing the outcome of the midterm elections.

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.