North Carolina scrubs 747,000 from voter rolls amid GOP lawsuit

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After the pandemic-marred 2020 election, where millions and millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots were sent out, essentially citing COVID-19 to flood the playing field, some states are making a concerted effort to clean up voter rolls, despite loud protests from those on the left who want the voting process to be as wide open as possible.

Despite a Democratic governor, the state of North Carolina can be counted among the states that have prioritized proper maintenance of voter rolls, removing over 700,000 records on file.

“From the start of 2023 through August 2024, county boards of elections in North Carolina removed more than 747,000 ineligible registration records from the state’s voter rolls,” the state Board of Elections said in a press release.

“That’s an average of more than 1,200 voter records removed from the voter list every single day during those 20 months. The county boards follow careful policies to ensure that only ineligible records are removed, not those of eligible voters,” the agency added.

The most common reason for removal was a duplicate registration due to moving within the state. The second most common reason for removal was individuals failing to vote in the last two federal elections and not responding to follow-up notifications seeking to confirm their registration.

Deceased voters were third, with 130,688 records removed for this reason.

“List maintenance is one of the primary responsibilities of election officials across North Carolina, and we take this responsibility seriously,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections. “Unfortunately, there is a lot of false information out there about our voter rolls and the efforts we undertake to keep them up to date. As we conduct these processes, we also must comply with state and federal laws and be careful not to remove any eligible voters.”

At the same time, the agency claimed that voter fraud “is exceedingly rare in North Carolina.” Citing a “comprehensive 2017 audit of the 2016 presidential election, in which nearly 4.8 million N.C. voters cast ballots,” the board said there were “two cases in which family members voted in the place of a recently deceased loved one.”

“We have extremely little evidence that individuals are voting in the names of others in North Carolina elections, and the voter photo ID requirement will help ensure this does not happen,” Brinson Bell said.

The Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party sued the Board of Elections last month over 225,000 names included on the rolls, claiming the state “failed to require identification from prospective voters to prove citizenship.”

“Only Americans should vote in American elections. If someone claims non-citizenship, they must be taken off the voter rolls – that’s the law. The NCSBE has chosen to blatantly ignore the law, undermine basic election safeguards, and neglect a fundamental principle of our election integrity,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said.

These records are likely not included among the 747,000 identified by the state as having been removed.

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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.