The NC Board of Elections Joins the Latest Voter Suppression Scam with New Policies
The Republican majority on the NC State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has jumped on board the latest voter suppression scam, using the myth of non-citizen voting to justify a scheme guaranteed to throw eligible citizens off the voter rolls instead.
At its April 16 meeting, the NCSBE voted on a 3-2 party-line basis for a program to compare North Carolina state voter rolls to an unreliable national database. When names don’t appear on both lists, local county boards of election will be required to confirm those voters’ citizenship. If it can’t be confirmed, those voters will have to appear at hearings to prove their citizenship with their own records, at their own costs of time and money that many voters can’t readily afford.
Comparing To Inaccurate Database
The new rules must be approved by the NC Rules Review Committee for approval before they go into effect. However, the NCSBE’s Republican majority also directed that North Carolina’s voter registration data be sent immediately to the federal Department of Homeland Security to be compared to their SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database.
An analysis by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found that the SAVE database often inaccurately flags citizens born outside the United States as non-citizens.
“The predictable result is that eligible voters, especially Latino voters, naturalized citizens, and low-income North Carolinians, will be caught up in a bureaucratic process that many simply will not have the time or resources to fight through,” said the NC Voter Protection Alliance (NCVPA). “And that’s the point. Voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare, accounting for only between 0.0003% and 0.001% of all ballots cast. There is no widespread problem to solve here. What this policy does is create a new barrier, shift the burden onto voters, and open the door to large-scale challenges of lawful registrations.”
A Distraction Tactic
“The whole myth of widespread non-citizen voting is garbage manufactured to support the repeated, disproven Trump lies of election fraud,” said Carrie Clark, Executive Director of the NC League of Conservation Voters (NCLCV). “They keep repeating those lies to distract from their wildly unpopular policies and failure to deliver a strong economy and safe environment.”
Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonprofit that encourages voting, added that she is concerned by the impact on young voters as well. “That population really concerns me about them having to jump through all of these hoops,” she said. “They might just sit out, not thinking that they can actually still vote.”
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