- Voter registration is an essential part of making elections secure
- A loophole in North Carolina’s same-day registration law allowed ballots from people who were not legally registered to vote to be counted
- The General Assembly closed that loophole in 2023, a change that survived a 2024 court challenge
This is part of a series of articles about problems with the 2020 election in North Carolina, most of which were detailed in the John Locke Foundation’s report “What Happened in 2020?,” and changes that have taken place since then. The other parts of the series deal with collusive lawsuit settlements altering election law, “Zuck bucks” (private election administration funding), and mail voting.
Over 1,700 ballots were accepted in the 2020 election in North Carolina from people not legally registered to vote. The election law loophole that allowed those 1,700 “ghost voters” has been closed, but only after several years of effort and a successful defense against a lawsuit.
Clean Voter Rolls Make for Cleaner Elections
In an ideal world, every person who is legally eligible to vote and wants to do so can vote, and nobody who is not lawfully eligible can. Such free and fair elections are the foundation of our republic.
As the franchise expanded in the United States in the 19th century, political machines and rampant election fraud dominated many parts of the United States. Many states instituted reforms such as the secret ballot and voter registration to combat that fraud.
As part of their legally mandated effort to keep voter registration rolls clean, every county board of elections regularly removes the registrations of those who have moved out of the county or have died. That does not catch all the registrations that are no longer associated with legal voters, however. So, election officials also perform biennial list maintenance, removing inactive registrations for voters they cannot reach.
Under North Carolina law, regular registrations must be completed by 25 days before election day. There are several exceptions to the law, the most commonly used of which is same-day registration (SDR) during early voting.
In 2020, a loophole in North Carolina’s law on SDRs forced county election officials to count ballots from people not legally registered to vote.
A Voter Registration Law Loophole Allows Votes from “Ghost Voters”
A 2020 North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) “Notice to Same-Day Registrants” included the following warning:
In the event the county board of elections cannot verify your address, your voter registration application will be denied and your absentee vote may be subject to challenge.
In other words, according to the notice, election officials would not accept an unverified voter registration, but the ballot associated with that denied registration would still be counted unless it is challenged.
The problem was aggravated by county election officials not processing SDRs, which is something the SBE had warned officials about in a 2016 memo:
The State Board of Elections is keenly aware that a number of same-day registrants fail mail verification after the county has completed its canvass [ten days after election day]. It is imperative that counties work diligently to issue verification mailings and log returned mail throughout the one-stop early voting period.
Ballots from denied SDRs could still be challenged, but it is an empty threat. Ballot challenges during the election can be made only based on “individualized evidence.”
As part of a public records request about the 2020 election, I asked the SBE, “How many ballots were not counted as a result of addresses not being verified by a verification mailing?” Their answer:
We would expect this number to be 0, because voter challenges are not allowed without individualized knowledge within 90 days of a federal election, and returned mail does not constitute individualized evidence.
In other words, ballots accepted from people not legally registered to vote were unchallengeable.
How many such “ghost voters” were there in the 2020 election? A later public records request revealed 1,760 unconfirmed SDRs in that election. The unverified rate for SDRs (1.82%) was almost twice as high as the unverified rate for non-SDR new registrations (0.95%). That finding was consistent with the results of a 2008 Civitas Institute report.
The number of ghost voters may be slightly less because a minuscule number of people who register during early voting do not cast ballots.
While 1,760 ghost voters might sound like a small problem, recall that only 401 votes decided a major statewide race in 2020: that for North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice.
Fixing the Ghost Voter Problem and Surviving a Court Challenge
Another problem with the SDR ghost voters is that same-day registrants are treated differently from other registrants. A person with an unverified regular registration would not be able to vote. Why should unverified SDRs be treated differently?
For those reasons, the ghost voter problem needed to be fixed. That fix came as an addition to Senate Bill 747 in 2023. The amended bill required county elections boards to “confirm same-day registrations (SDR) during early voting the same way they confirm all other voter registrations in order for a ballot associated with an SDR to be counted.”
The General Assembly passed SB 747 over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto. In addition to correcting the ghost voter problem, the bill delivered a host of election reforms that Locke had advocated for, which made “North Carolina elections better run and more secure.”
In October 2023, the Elias Law Group tried to reopen the ghost voter loophole that SB 747 closed. They filed a lawsuit with other leftist groups, seeking several changes that would have effectively brought back ghost voters. A federal judge rejected most of their claims, only telling election officials they had to notify those whose SDRs were denied. The SBE implemented a rule change to comply with the court order.
With that challenge out of the way, the SDR verification requirement and other reforms in SB 747 had a mostly smooth debut in the 2024 primary. Interestingly, according to data in the SBE’s “absentee_20240305.zip” file, only 37 ballots were designated “SDR-FAILED VERIFICATION.” That is much less than the several hundred we would have expected if SDRs failed verification in 2024 at the same rate as they did in the 2020 general election.One thing we will look at with data in the 2024 general election is how many SDRs failed verification and why. In the meantime, North Carolina’s ghost voter problem appears to be fixed.
