Midterm elections are close to starting and a new report found that North Carolina has a serious issue with voters still on its rolls.
The report shows that more than 60,000 registered voters in the state of North Carolina, whose midterm voting start in around six week, are dead, registered in another state or registered twice under variations of their name, the Public Interest Legal Foundation said, Just The News reported.
The report showed that 7,933 North Carolinians who died in 2020 are still registered to vote in the state.
“North Carolina officials need to use the time they still have to prepare voter rolls for the midterm elections,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams said. “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.”
The foundation’s audit began in late 2019 with the tracking of a sample of registered voters that matched the Social Security Death Index – to see how long it usually took the state’s Board of Elections to remove them from the voter roll after they were listed as deceased.
About 12,940 deceased registrants were found in spring 2020. And according to the index, 95% of them died before 2020. The 7,933 deceased voters still on the roll show that some of the registrants, but not all, have been removed.
The foundation found two instances in which registered voters were dead for about 20 years but not removed from the voter roll until 2021.
A total of 42,984 registered voters in North Carolina left the state and established or renewed their out-of-state voter registration before the 2020 Election.
The group utilized the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address system and as well as the organization’s national voter database to follow the voters who moved from North Carolina to another state and see if they registered there before November 2020.
“The state’s voter rolls are also filled with tens of thousands of duplicate registrations. The Foundation found 42,984 North Carolinians were registered in another state before the 2020 election,” the report said.
“Additionally, 13,525 North Carolinians managed to become registered twice under variations of their name. This is extremely concerning as the state moves toward expanding vote by mail because these registrants would receive multiple ballots,” it said.
