The Independent View: NC Voter Registration Irregularities Under Gov. Pat McCrory

This post is from a Daily Kos article on May 7, 2015 by DocDawg.

A data-mining analysis of information publicly available from the North Carolina State Board of Elections has uncovered apparently systematic irregularities in voter registration efforts which are required of the state by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Motor Voter Act (NVRA). These irregularities, potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of poverty-level North Carolina citizens, have all occurred during the Republican administration of North Carolina's current governor, Pat McCrory (R).

Under McCrory, who took office in January of 2013, North Carolina has become the tip of the GOP's spear in efforts to suppress voting by demographic groups which typically do not lean Republican: blacks, Latinos, youth, and the economically disadvantaged. McCrory's efforts culminated in 2013 with his signing into law of the nation's single most draconian voter suppression bill, The Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA). Legal challenges to VIVA have been filed by numerous organizations including the North Carolina NAACP, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice. Oral arguments in NC-NAACP v. McCrory will begin in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, in Winston-Salem, on July 6th. But while many of those suits argue, in part, that VIVA may have been intended to suppress minority voting, evidence of such malicious intent has been hard to come by.

NVRA requires the states to provide citizens with the opportunity to register to vote for federal elections by three important means:

- At the same time that they apply for or renew driver's licenses.
- At the same time that they apply for Public Assistance (PA) programs, such as food stamps or welfare.
- By mail.

NVRA also requires the states to collect data regarding how many voter registration applications are generated via each of these means, and to report summaries of those data to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) every two years. EAC, in turn, is required to submit a summary report to Congress biennially, the most recent such report covers the 2011-2012 period, the 2013-2014 report is due by June 30th of this year.

From 1995 through 2012, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBOE) published on its web site annual summaries, in the form of Excel spreadsheets, of its NVRA compliance data. But, beginning in 2013 (when McCrory took office), that practice appears to have come to a halt, and no annual summaries are available there for McCrory's term (2013-2014). Monthly data files, for the period May 2010 through March 2015, are still made available on the SBOE web site, but these are comma-delimited (CSV) machine-readable data sets, not easily understood by average readers.

Curious to know how NVRA compliance was faring in North Carolina under McCrory, and troubled by the absence of recent annual summaries by which this could be judged, DocDawg and colleagues recently unpacked and data-mined the monthly data files available at the SBOE web site.

Finding 1: A systematic sharp decline in new voter registrations originating from Public Assistance (PA) programs began on or about January 2013 and continues to this day.

Finding 2: The 'McCrory Deficit' is unlikely to be due merely to declining PA applications

Today, North Carolina's voter registration rolls are missing some 40,000 or more poverty-level citizens, and still counting, due to what may prove to be systematic actions by the McCrory administration, in possible violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. To put that number of voters in perspective: in the 2014 election, Thom Tillis (R) beat incumbent Kay Hagan (D) for his current U.S. Senate seat by roughly the same number, just 45,608 votes.

CLICK HERE to read the full article and detailed analysis of the charts.

UPDATE
North Carolina's chapter of the NAACP, under its leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, has long been at the forefront of the fight for minority voting rights in the Tarheel State, most recently by filing a lawsuit in federal courts seeking to overturn the state's and Gov. McCrory's worst-in-the-nation voter ID and voter suppression law, the Voter Information Verification Act. NC-NAACP sprang into action as soon as it was alerted to this breaking story, rapidly coordinating with other voting rights organizations at both the state and national level to respond forcefully to these revelations. On May 8th, in a coalition of groups including Demos, Project Vote, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Southern Coalition for Social Justice, with an able assist by Democracy NC, submitting a warning letter to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services informing them that North Carolina was in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, and threatening the state with possible legal action.