The North Carolina State Election Board admitted it allowed thousands of voters to register to vote despite not providing federally required identifying information — a violation the board has now agreed to correct after the Republican National Committee (RNC) sued. The agreement comes nearly two years after The Federalist first reported on the questionable registrations.
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires prospective voters to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Voters who are unable to provide either must fill in a “Checkbox” attesting they lack both forms of identification. But in North Carolina, as many as 195,000 people were found on the state’s voter rolls whose voter records lacked the required ID number.
Since 2004, HAVA has required states to collect this information to verify a prospective voter’s eligibility. States are supposed to verify the prospective voter’s driver’s license number against the state’s Motor Vehicle Administration database. If a prospective voter lacks a driver’s license, the state is supposed to use the last four digits of his Social Security number, name, and date of birth.
While this system does not necessarily guarantee proof of citizenship, since noncitizens can obtain both driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, it’s one of the few congressionally mandated safeguards to protect election integrity.
As previously reported by The Federalist, the state’s old registration document contributed to the problem. Old versions of the application form clearly marked certain fields — like name, address, and date of birth — as required, highlighting them in red. However, sections requiring a driver’s license identification number or the last four digits of a Social Security number were not clearly identified as mandatory.
Election integrity activists raised concerns about the issue, claiming as many as 225,000 registered voters were missing the required information. Following those complaints, the state agreed to update its registration form in 2024.
But as The Federalist’s Breccan Thies previously reported, the voter rolls were not immediately fixed. In fact “the NCSBE has known about the incomplete registrations at least since 2023, but refused to do anything to fix the issue leading up to the 2024 election because, at the time, it was Democrat-run.”
The RNC sued the state election board over the violations in 2024, while the Department of Justice also filed a separate but similar lawsuit challenging the registrations that lacked proper information.
The RNC and the election board reached an agreement in which the latter agreed it would no longer accept registration forms without a driver’s license number, the last four digits of a prospective voter’s Social Security number, or a filled-in checkbox asserting the voter’s lack of either ID number.
The agreement also obligates the board to retrieve that information from voters who initially failed to provide it. Of those voters identified as missing the required ID number or checkbox, voters who fail to provide either form of ID or fill in the checkbox by the deadline for “curing” a ballot after a given election will not have their ballots counted in local and statewide elections. The consent agreement does, however, allow the voters in question to vote in federal elections.
“For too long, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections failed to meet basic safeguards that protect our elections. Democrats in North Carolina want to count ballots without a driver’s license number or Social Security number as required by the law,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement. “The parties’ agreement to enter into a consent judgment is a major win for election integrity and a clear rebuke of Democrats who tried to weaken basic safeguards.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
