‘We expect this lawsuit will cause North Carolina to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A conservative nonprofit filed a lawsuit against North Carolina election officials last week for failing to clean two of its counties’ voter rolls.
After analyzing North Carolina’s voter registration data, Judicial Watch found that the state has nearly 1 million inactive and ineligible voters on its rolls, meaning, 1 million voters registered in the state have not voted for more than five years.
About 17% of North Carolina’s registrations were inactive in 2019, according to data provided by the state itself. Compare that to the median inactive rate of 9.6%.
And in at least 19 of North Carolina’s counties, that inactive rate was closer to 20%, with at least three counties surpassing a 25% inactive rate.
Yet the state’s election officials, and at least two of its counties, have failed to take action, the lawsuit alleges.
The election officials are required by law to clean up these voter rolls and remove the deceased citizens, felons and former residents from their registered voters list.
But North Carolina has dragged its feet, reportedly implementing a program to appease the courts, but then failing to publicly provide records that prove the program is actually cleaning the state’s voter rolls, Judicial Watch alleged.
“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, and Judicial Watch must insist that North Carolina follows federal law to clean up its voting rolls,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
“We want cleaner elections, as the law requires, and we expect this lawsuit will cause North Carolina to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls the names of voters who have moved away or died,” Fitton said.
North Carolina’s refusal to clean its voter rolls enables voter fraud within the state, according to a report by RealClearPolitics. Voters are able to take advantage of absentee voting, the report found, as they did in a 2016 election in St. Louis.
In fact, widespread violations of absentee-ballot laws had become such a problem in the city’s voting totals that Missouri officials had to hold a new election.
They discovered that fake absentee ballots had been used as a weapon against Missouri House candidate Bruce Franks, who lost the primary election to another Democrat. But after the voter fraud was discovered, a new election was held, and Franks won.
Similarly, accusations of absentee ballot fraud in a 2018 congressional election led the state to investigate North Carolina’s 9th District, which Republican Mark Harris won by a narrow margin of just over 905 votes.
Amid complaints and a formal probe from partisan members of the State Board of Elections, Harris withdrew due to health complications. A special election later resulted in then-state Sen. Dan Bishop, also a Republican, winning by a more decisive margin.