A federal judge on Monday approved a settlement in a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice accusing North Carolina election officials of failing to maintain accurate voter registration records.
The settlement between the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the North Carolina State Board of Elections was approved by U.S. District Judge Richard Myers. The agreement forgoes the need for a trial.
“The United States and State Board Defendants, through counsel, have conferred in good faith and agree that this action should be settled without protracted and costly litigation,” he wrote in the order.
The department’s lawsuit, filed in May, alleged that North Carolina did not require new voters to provide identification, either in the form of their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, on a state voter registration form in violation of the Help America Vote Act. The suit cited allegations that over 200,000 records were filed improperly.
As the lawsuit proceeded in court, the state board launched a “Registration Repair Project,” asking about 103,000 registered voters to provide missing identification numbers. The decision came in July as part of the state board’s efforts to resolve the lawsuit.
The board was already planning to ensure voter rolls in the state were accurate when the lawsuit was filed. A Republican majority took control of the board in May after an appeals court ruling.
“The complaint was asking for nothing more than what we were already preparing to do, which was to look internally for this information at the same time that we were reaching out to the voters themselves to provide the information,” Sam Hayes, the NCSBE’s executive director, told reporters on Monday. “So we’re on a path to do that now.”
The agreement requires the state elections board to send a round of letters by December to registered voters who have not responded to a request to provide their identification numbers. The records of roughly 81,810 voters lacked identification as of Sept. 2, federal and state government lawyers wrote in a joint motion filed last week. The board must also provide updates to the DOJ until June 30, 2027.
JUDGE TEMPORARILY BLOCKS SOUTH CAROLINA FROM GIVING MILLIONS OF VOTERS’ DATA TO DOJ
The agreement does not apply to an additional 98,000 registered voters who have provided identification information that has not yet been validated by a government database.
When filing the lawsuit, the DOJ was following President Donald Trump’s executive order on safeguarding federal elections. The order says that states must comply with federal laws that “guard against dilution by illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”
