The Independent View: NC Crackdown on Alleged Non-Citizens

In 2014, the Raleigh-based Voter Integrity Project, headed by Jay DeLancy, declared that "tens of thousands" of non-citizens were registered to vote in the state. The Project, along with the anti-immigrant group NC FIRE and others, had been making such claims for years, even after they were repeatedly debunked.

But weeks before the November 2014 elections, two political scientists at Old Dominion University revived the debate with a guest column in The Washington Post, claiming that up to 6 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. voted in 2008, nearly 18,000 in North Carolina alone. Despite being widely criticized by election experts for using unreliable self-reported survey answers and having an extremely small sample size, the story generated national buzz in right-wing media outlets and was seized on by activists like DeLancy, who contacted state officials about the alleged "non-US citizen fire storm".

North Carolina election officials have had procedures for removing ineligible voters from the rolls, including non-citizens, for many years. However, efforts to target suspected non-citizens were stepped up in 2013, after Republican lawmakers installed new leadership at the N.C. State Board of Elections. In the fall of that year, the state board signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify voters' citizenship status, using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.

Drawing on SAVE data, the N.C. elections board launched a "Citizenship Audit" in 2014 that identified 10,000 registered voters in need of "review." Distancing themselves from the larger numbers floated by DeLancy and others, N.C. election officials announced they had identified only 1,454 individuals in 81 counties with possible citizenship status problems.

Despite the time and expense poured into the Citizenship Audit program, it ended up identifying few cases of potential non-citizen voting.

According to a report on the Citizenship Audit prepared by the N.C. State Board of Elections in February of this year, out of the 1,454 names flagged by the state election board, 1,365, or 94 percent, didn't attempt to vote. Of the 89 who did come to a voting site, 64 were challenged by election officials or stopped for further questioning. In nearly two-thirds of the cases, the voter was able to prove s/he was indeed a citizen (30 voters), or the challenge was otherwise dropped (13).

The challenges to alleged non-citizens were sustained in only 11 cases, or .0004 percent of the 2.9 million ballots cast in 2014, and .0002 percent of North Carolina's 6.6 million registered voters.

The problems with the N.C. election board's Citizenship Audit appear to have been exacerbated by the way it was carried out by state officials in 2014.

According to the state board's own report, the list of potential non-citizens wasn't finalized until Oct. 24, 2014, a day after early voting had already begun in North Carolina and 49 days after the start of mail-in absentee voting. After the list was drawn up, there was more delay in distributing the list to county election boards, along with a 25-page instruction manual on what to do if any of the 1,454 individuals showed up to vote.

Last year, a federal court ruled that Florida violated federal election law when it purged suspected non-citizen voters within three months of the 2012 elections. Florida's purge violated the "90 Days Provision" of the Help America Vote Act, which requires states to "complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters."

Because North Carolina didn't actively purge the alleged non-citizen voters in 2014, it likely didn't run afoul of the law, but the state's last-minute watch list of flagged voters proved chaotic for local elections officials.

It's impossible to tell from the state data if voters were improperly blocked from voting. The state's Citizen Audit report notes that 10 people on the list "left without voting" after being formally or informally challenged, but that figure, based on what counties reported back to the N.C. State Board of Elections, may understate how many were turned away. For example, figures given to Facing South detailing Meckenburg County's report to state officials states that "0" people left without voting after facing a challenge or "unofficial inquiry," despite the Audit report.

According to voting rights advocates, voter stories underscores how the crusade to stop non-citizen voting can end up causing more damage to the integrity of elections than the fraud it claims to eliminate. They also say it opens the door to a form of election racial profiling and a climate of harassment at the polls that can intimidate and ultimately disenfranchise voters.

"It's a modern-day witch-hunt," Bob Hall of the election watchdog group Democracy North Carolina told Facing South. "When legitimate voters are stopped from voting, that's a form of voting fraud."

Most election experts seem to agree that voting records in North Carolina and other states do contain errors, including the names of non-citizens. But it's a "relatively small" issue compared to the myriad other problems plaguing state and federal elections, according to Prof. Rick Hasen at the University of California-Irvine School of Law who runs Election Law Blog.

What's more, Hasen has argued that these and other problems with registration and voting could be addressed with a federal overhaul of the election system, such as "a national voter identification program run by the federal government which paid for all the costs associated with establishing identity and citizenship." But due to state resistance to federal intrusion in elections, especially among conservative lawmakers, Hasen added, "I don't expect we will see this program in my lifetime."

The first problem is board of elections not giving the voters enough time to correct the voting records before the election. Also, why weren't the voters given provisional ballots and time to correct the voter rolls and have their vote counted?