Mary Kay Heling thought the fight for her vote was finally over. With the conclusion of the North Carolina Supreme Court election challenge in May, and with her voter registration updated and verified, she could finally breathe easy. But then the Department of Justice sued the state Board of Elections.
“Well I should have known — no,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s a constant struggle with everything these days when it comes to government, and that is what’s most frustrating.”
Last month, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina Board of Elections, accusing it of failing to maintain accurate voter lists in compliance with the 2004 Help America Vote Act, which requires all eligible voters to provide the last four digits of their Social Security numbers or their license numbers in order to register to vote. The suit sought to have a court compel the board to devise a plan to correct the incomplete registrations of more than 200,000 registered voters. But voters like Heling and voting rights organizations fear that the lawsuit will once again threaten to disenfranchise North Carolinians, whose 2024 ballots just survived the state’s Supreme Court election challenge.
Heling, a 68-year-old resident of Raleigh, told Salon that having the validity of her voter registration called into question for a second time in the span of a year has left her dumbfounded. “We’re in the books as registered. We bring our ID, we vote. And it’s not good enough?” Heling said, exasperated. “So who’s to say anybody’s vote is safe?”
“Will all these people being challenged be notified? That’s my biggest concern,” said Heling, who had registered as an unaffiliated voter. “And will they just give up because it’s constant, that we constantly feel like this is being challenged, or will they fight back? We don’t know.”
The lawsuit came on the heels of a drawn-out fight over North Carolina’s Supreme Court. Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin challenged the votes of more than 60,000 North Carolinians on the same voter registration grounds as part of an effort to overturn his electoral loss to North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. As that case ping-ponged between federal and state courts for six months, voters previously told Salon that the duration and scope of the lawsuit created an extra hurdle to ensuring their right to vote remained intact and began to chip away at their trust in the state’s electoral system. Meanwhile, the state Board of Elections also acknowledged that there could be North Carolinians with incomplete registrations in the voter rolls, but election integrity safeguards ensured only eligible voters participated in elections.
The DOJ’s legal action, however, stems from the department’s stated concern about the potential for voter fraud in North Carolina’s elections due to an alleged 218,000 voters’ registrations lacking the necessary identification numbers, an unverified sum that stems from a 2023 administrative complaint submitted to the board by Carol Snow, a GOP-affiliated voter and self-described “election denier.”
“The cornerstone of public trust in government lies in free and fair elections,” the lawsuit reads. “The core of the compact between a state and its citizens rests in ensuring that only eligible citizens can vote in elections.”
A DOJ spokesperson said the department had no comment on the matter.
According to the lawsuit, the state’s voter registration application form did not list the Social Security or driver’s license numbers as required, meaning that some voters did not provide either. In other cases, North Carolinians did provide that information, but clerical or database errors prevented it from being linked with their names.
The latter was the case for Heling, who learned her two-part first name may have prevented her registration from being matched to her Social Security number. Analysis of the list of affected voters during the Griffin challenge found that these clerical and matching errors disproportionately occurred with women and people of color, who are more likely to change their last names and more likely to have culturally reflective names misspelled, respectively.
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Critics of the lawsuit also argue that fears of fraudulent ballots are more imagined than voter fraud is real, with data showing it’s exceedingly rare. Plus, existing safeguards in the process stave off the chance that ineligible voters would be able to cast ballots at a large scale. The requirement that North Carolinians present photo ID at the precinct when they vote in person or provide identification numbers to request an absentee ballot is one such election integrity protection.
Still, early last week, the North Carolina Board of Elections approved a three-part plan to rectify any incomplete voter registrations with a tentative agreement that the DOJ will drop the suit if the board carries out its plan.
Under the plan, the board will mail two notices to each affected voter requesting the missing identification information. Some 98,000 voters whose records lack the information will need to respond to the mailings or will have to vote provisionally until they update their records. The other 97,000 impacted voters will still be able to cast a normal ballot because they have complied with HAVA but election officials do not have their identification information on their registration record.
“I’ve said from day one that I am committed to bringing North Carolina into compliance with the law. I believe this three-part plan is the best way to ensure this happens,” Sam Hayes, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said in a statement. “We are making this process as simple and straightforward as possible for the affected voters.”
“We are the battleground state for seeing how far we can suppress the vote, oppress the vote, repress the vote.”
Hayes became the board’s executive director in May when the Republican state auditor assumed control over the board. When the board was under Democratic control in the months prior, it fought the claims of voter ineligibility presented in the Griffin and NCGOP lawsuits, citing protections in the state’s voter ID laws, and argued that requiring voters to clear more hurdles to continue to vote was unfair.
The spate of individuals and organizations attempting to intervene in the DOJ lawsuit fear that this correction process has the potential to disenfranchise voters who fail or are unable to respond to the mailings, or discourage North Carolinians from voting because of the additional hoops it creates.
Adrianne Spoto, counsel for voting rights with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told Salon that the constituents and voting rights organizations she’s representing, which include Heling and the NAACP North Carolina State Conference, wanted to ensure that voters’ voices aren’t shut out of the board’s process.
“This is a threat to the registration of our clients, as well as other individual voters. If the state board does end up reaching out to try to collect this information, what happens if someone doesn’t receive that request?” Spoto said in a phone interview ahead of the board’s announcement last week. Voters reached out months after the North Carolina GOP sent out the initial notices in the Griffin litigation, having just learned that their vote was being contested, she said.
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While Spoto said they’re still reviewing the board’s proposed plan for fixing the registration omissions and errors, they remain concerned that the plan “could put at risk the ballots of voters who did everything that was asked of them at the time that they registered and are now being asked to navigate additional administrative hurdles to ensure their votes can count.”
The fact that people of color are likely to be overrepresented on the list of affected voters is why the NAACP NCSC had to try to intervene, said Deborah Maxwell, NAACP NCSC president.
“That is counter to our mission statement,” Maxwell told Salon. “I live in the city of 1898, where we were killed because we voted,” she added, referencing the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of at least 60 Black men by white mobs seeking to prevent them from voting. “Now they don’t kill people on the streets. They create legislation to deny people the right to vote.”
The Democratic National Committee has also requested to intervene in the lawsuit to defend voters against the federal government’s “baseless allegations” about the state’s non-compliance. Democratic National Committee Litigation Director Dan Freeman told Salon that the party stands “ready to fight for voters to remain on” the voter rolls and that their concerns aren’t “about party, this is about democracy.”
“Voter registration rolls should be complete, accurate, and up-to-date,” Freeman told Salon in a statement. “However, the NC State Board of Elections’ plan to inactivate eligible voters and force them to cast uncertain provisional ballots risks disenfranchising these voters and violates federal law.”
The court has not yet ruled on the motions from the DNC, Southern Coalition for Social Justice or the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans, but the state Board of Elections and the Justice Department oppose their entry into the litigation.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Board of Elections directed Salon to its legal filing arguing against allowing intervenors in the case.
“Each of the Proposed Intervenors appears to misunderstand the scope of the relief requested in the complaint,” the board’s filing said, noting that the complaint only calls for the board to “develop a plan to contact and collect the allegedly missing information”; it does not demand that any registered voter be removed from the voter rolls in the process.
Maxwell said, however, that she’s confident the court will grant her and the other proposed intervenors’ requests. How could it not allow voters to be present in litigation pertaining to voters?
“We are the battleground state for seeing how far we can suppress the vote, oppress the vote, repress the vote,” she added. “That’s what certain individuals who are elected and appointed are trying to do within this state.”
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