The North Carolina State Board of Elections has backtracked on plans to designate a certain class of registered voter as inactive. The policy reversal means these voters will be able to cast regular, not provisional, ballots.
At its meeting on Aug. 28, the bipartisan, Republican-majority board voted 3-2 to adopt guidelines that would have meant voters who complied with federal and state law when registering still would have had to cast provisional ballots due to clerical errors in their registration records. The vote along party lines would have violated state and federal law.
"So, we're trying to comport with the law, both the letter and the spirit of the law," Sam Hayes, the state elections board's executive director, said during Monday's discussion and debate of the newer guidelines.
Under the federal Help America Vote Act, which took effect in 2004, a registrant must provide either a driver's license number or last four digits of their Social Security Number. But for around 98,000 North Carolina voters, their registration information failed to match either the DMV or Social Security Administration database.
By law, in those cases, a voter would have had to show a so-called HAVA ID, such as a utility bill, when first presenting to vote. Thereafter, that registered voter would be listed as active and eligible to cast a regular ballot.
Nonetheless, the board's three GOP members voted last month to require these voters to be marked as inactive and to cast a provisional ballot until their records were corrected. Today, the board voted unanimously to reverse that policy.
Now, under the guidelines adopted at Monday's meeting, the onus will be on county elections boards to take steps to correct the registration record discrepancies.
"I believe staff has found a way that we can still notate for our records whose number has not validated, and we will continue to try and reach out to those voters," said GOP board member Stacy Eggers, who, at last month's meeting, had advocated for the initial policy of marking these voters as inactive.
State law already requires county elections boards to notify a voter if the number submitted for registration has not validated. Now, however, the county boards must conduct records reviews for these voters by Dec. 15.
If these reviews do not turn up any clerical errors such as transposed numbers or issues with names such as an omitted hyphen or a change from maiden to a married name, then the county boards must contact the voter by mail.
Starting next August, ahead of the primary elections for the 2026 midterms, the county boards will send letters to these voters asking them for help in clearing up the discrepancy in their registration records.
The local boards will continue to send letters to these voters twice a year, in January and August, until the issue has been resolved. However, a voter shall not be required to cast a provisional ballot solely because of this issue.
