Elections board finally collecting missing voter ID numbers

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) will work to collect missing data from hundreds of thousands of voter registrations this year. That will fix a problem the board should have fixed in 2023 and correct a decades-long mistake.

SBE Executive Director Sam Hayes announced the launch of the program to the media on July 17. He also addressed claims that the problem is designed to remove eligible voters:

No duly registered voter is going to be removed because of this project. We are required by both state and federal law to go back and collect this information. This is due to a faulty form that was promulgated years ago. It’s not the fault of the voters, but at the same time we’re required by the law to go back and collect this information, which should have been done at the time, and it certainly should have been done in the intervening time. This is just an effort to comply with law to settle this litigation.

Under the program, election officials will attempt to collect either the driver’s license number or the last four digits of the Social Security number for hundreds of thousands of registrations that currently miss that information. Voters with missing numbers who show up to vote will be required to use a provisional ballot and provide one of the missing numbers. Their ballots will be counted once the numbers are verified.

Voter ID will aid in the process since the most common ID used for voting is the driver’s license. Election officials will be able to collect the required information on the spot.

The board, which consists of three Republican and two Democratic appointees, unanimously approved the program in June to settle a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice.

The SBE will finally stop being in violation of federal and state law

What did Hayes mean when he said that the SBE was required by federal and state law to collect that information?

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA, see page 45) requires election officials to get either the driver’s license number or the last four digits of the Social Security number for all voter registrations (registrations before that time without that information are grandfathered in). The only exception is for the tiny number of Americans who have neither number. Otherwise, the law states, “an application for voter registration for an election for Federal office may not be accepted or processed by a State unless the application includes one of those numbers.”

State law is just as strict:

North Carolina law (GS 163-82.4) also requires voter registration application forms to request the registrants’ “[d]rivers license number or, if the applicant does not have a driver’s license number, the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number.” Again, the law includes a provision for election officials to provide a unique identifier for any voters who do not have either of those ID numbers.

Those numbers are not included in the list of optional information in the law:

The county board shall make a diligent effort to complete for the registration records any information requested on the form that the applicant does not complete, but no application shall be denied because an applicant does not state race, ethnicity, gender, or telephone number.

Having that information can make North Carolina’s voter rolls more secure by allowing election officials to better cross-check rolls against other data sources, verifying that they are who they say they are and confirming that they remain eligible to vote where they are registered.

The missing data resulted from a decades-old, poorly designed voter registration form that made it appear to some voters that the ID numbers were optional. In 2023, the SBE agreed to fix the form after a series of “HAVA complaints” from North Carolina activist Carol Snow. However, they refused to collect those numbers for the registrations missing them, despite state law demanding a “diligent effort” to get any missing required information.

Jefferson Griffin was right about voter registration ID numbers

Several media organizations have noted that the Justice Department’s complaint over the missing HAVA number problem was similar to a complaint in Jefferson Griffin’s lawsuit seeking to overturn his 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court election loss.

That is because Griffin was correct in his assertion that the registrations violate state law. The state Supreme Court agreed with Griffin even as they rejected his request that ballots associated with those registrations not be counted:

To the extent that the registrations of voters in the first category are incomplete, the Board is primarily, if not totally, responsible… In 2023, however, the Board became aware and admitted that it had not been in compliance with these requirements since they were initially imposed… The Board took action by updating the voter registration application form going forward; it did nothing, however, to ensure that any past violations were remedied… The Boar’s inattention and failure to dutifully conform its conduct to the law’s requirements is deeply troubling.

Justice Richard Dietz wrote a partial concurrence in which he stated, “the [SBE] displayed a troubling lack of competence in its maintenance of the voter rolls.”

The court rejected the post hoc rejection of otherwise legal ballots, not Griffin’s claim that the SBE violated state law by not collecting the required ID numbers.

The SBE should have fixed the missing voter ID number problem in 2023. It is good that they are finally getting around to it.

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