Old North News

North Carolina voter rolls are plagued with duplicate registrations and deceased registrants, a public interest law firm specializing in election integrity has found.

The Public Interest Legal Found (PILF) found nearly 8,000 deceased voters registered -- one who has been dead for 25 years -- and tens of thousands of duplicate registrations on the rolls in the Tar Heel State.

Poorly maintained rolls are one of the easiest avenues to voter fraud, says PILF President J. Christian Adams.

“North Carolina officials need to use the time they still have to prepare voter rolls for the midterm elections,” Adams said in a statement. “Time is running out. Silly, obvious errors in the voter roll can create opportunities for voter fraud and chaos in a close election. Correcting deceased and duplicate records now will help to preemptively address those risks.”

Among other findings, the study noted that 13,525 North Carolinians are registered to vote twice in the state under different variations of their names. PILF attributed the error, in part, to a voter registration system that can be “tricked into registering a person multiple times with extremely similar biographical data inputs at the same addresses.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is a legal group based in Indianapolis.

In the 2020 elections, PILF said North Carolina broke its record for undeliverable and unaccounted for mail ballots, 2,860 and nearly 86,000 respectively.

“An undeliverable ballot typically means the voter data is out of date and available tools are not being leveraged to spot the problem in advance,’ the study said. “Unknown ballots are officially defined as those transmitted without tracking which never returned for counting.”

“In other words, local authorities do not know what happened to the ballots," the study continued. "Put into the context of the 2020 presidential election, for almost every ballot President Donald Trump won over then candidate Joe Biden, another went to an old address or is missing.”

Trump carried North Carolina by more than 72,000 votes.

Research by PILF has shown that the voter rolls in many states are ill-managed with duplicate registrations and deceased voters still on the rolls. In September 2020 the foundation published the results of an inspection of the rolls in 42 states, called Safeguarding America’s Votes and Elections.

Among other irregularities it found 349,773 deceased voter registrants, and that in the 2018 general election 37,889 duplicate registrants “apparently casting two votes from the same address.”