NC residents flagged by a federal database will be asked to confirm citizenship before voting

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is planning to ask the 1,599 registered voters flagged by a federal database as potential noncitizens to either confirm their citizenship or ask to be removed from the state voter list. 

The letters will go out to those registered voters early next week, state elections board spokesman Jason Tyson said Friday. 

The board announced in July that the federal SAVE database had flagged nearly 1,600 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state. The board hadn’t acted on the information until the U.S. Supreme Court last week authorized the use of the SAVE database to find noncitizens on voter rolls. The North Carolina elections board decided last year to feed its voter list into the database. 

SAVE is run by Homeland Security and was built to check people’s immigration status to see if they are eligible for public benefits. But it has been prone to error when used as a voter screening tool.

NC has a list of nearly 1600 people flagged as noncitizens on its voter rolls. How will it be used?

Texas was one of the first states to use the SAVE database to look for noncitizens registered to vote. Recently, the Texas Secretary of State said in a press release that of the 2,724 people the database flagged as potential noncitizens, 578 were actually citizens.

A final copy of the North Carolina elections board letter was not ready, Tyson said, but it will ask residents to provide citizenship confirmation by email, fax, mail, or in person. The letter will also have instructions for residents who are registered by mistake and want to be removed from the rolls, Tyson said. 

“If you try to vote as a noncitizen, that’s a crime,” he said. 

Federal law bans voter roll purges in the 90 days before an election, a time called the “quiet period.” 

Tyson said the plan is a volunteer, individual process, so it is not a systematic removal of registrants that would be prohibited during the quiet period. 

Whether sending the letters violates the quiet period ban depends on what they say, said Jeff Loperfido, chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. 

It will be fine if the letter advises people who are not citizens to terminate their registrations and tells people who are citizens that they can ignore the letter, he said. 

“If the letter says you must provide something to be able to vote, that’s more problematic,” Loperfido said. “The devil’s in the details.”

North Carolina has a voter ID law, but drivers licenses are not proof of citizenship. 

Tyson said people who receive a letter and show up to vote without having provided citizenship proof will still be able to cast a ballot. 

“Typically, they would not be turned away,” he said. “The process would happen on the backend.”

Loperfido said he hopes the letters don’t deter eligible voters from casting ballots. 

“I’d hate for the message to be intimidating to people,” he said.