Repair project has completed 32,000 NC voter registration records
The North Carolina State Board of Elections’ Registration Repair Project has completed registration records of more than 32,000 voters statewide. The board provided the latest numbers in a federal court filing Friday.
The repair project stems from state and federal lawsuits that challenged North Carolina’s voter registration records.
Critics charged that the elections board failed for years to collect required information from voters, either a driver’s license number or last four digits of a Social Security number. The federal Help America Vote Act mandates that states collect that information when registering voters.
Once the elections board flipped from a 3-2 Democratic majority to a 3-2 majority favoring Republicans last spring, board members and new Executive Director Sam Hayes focused new attention on filling gaps in voter registration records.
The state elections board and US Justice Department settled a federal lawsuit in September that focused on HAVA compliance. US Chief District Judge Richard Myers signed off on the settlement.
Friday’s court filing offered Myers a status update.
“Since the beginning of the Registration Repair Project on July 17, 2025, to the date of this filing, the total number of voters missing this information has decreased from 103,329 to 70,709,” wrote state Special Deputy Attorney General Mary Lucasse, who represents the elections board.
That’s a decrease of 32,620 incomplete voter registration records, or 31.6% of the total number of voters originally targeted in the repair project.
The elections board sent mail to 74,333 voters on Nov. 24. It was the second mass mailing tied to the repair project. Elections officials updated 2,355 records from Dec. 1 to Jan. 30.
Myers issued an order last month rejecting attempts from the Democratic National Committee and clients of Democratic operative Marc Elias to reopen the election dispute tied to the repair project.
The judge’s order turned down intervention requests from the DNC and the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans. The Elias Law Group represents the retirees group.
“[T]he court will start by examining the Alliance’s concern that the court failed to consider any impact its Order may have on state and local elections,” Myers wrote. “This concern is easily allayed; the Order provides, and this enforcement action seeks, relief specifically for statutory (HAVA) violations concerning ‘elections for Federal office.’ Thus, the action and Order are limited in nature and scope.”
“Nothing in the Order (nor in this action for that matter) challenges, addresses, or references the State Board’s policies and/or procedures regarding state and local elections,” Myers continued. “The Alliance has taken no action (nor even suggested attempting) to amend the nature or broaden the scope of this case to include purported violations of voters’ statutory and/or constitutional rights concerning state and local elections. To the extent that the Alliance disagrees with the State Board ‘s actions, if any, taken outside the scope of the Order, it may pursue relief through appropriate channels.”
“In this respect, the Alliance fails to demonstrate that disposition of this action ‘may as a practical matter impair or impede’ the Alliance’s ‘ability to protect’ an ‘interest relating to the property or transaction that is the subject of the action,’” Myers added.
The judge also ruled that the retirees alliance “fails to explain or identify how it or its members are unduly burdened by the State Board’s compliance with HAVA procedural requirements in North Carolina’s federal elections.”
“Finally, the Alliance asserts that the State Board failed to adequately represent its interest in objecting to the Order’s ‘Election Day procedure,’” Myers wrote. “Under the procedure, voters appearing on Election Day who present HAVA-required information, but who did not previously update their registration records with the required information, will vote by provisional ballot. Here, the Alliance objects that ‘HAVA does not require relegating these voters to provisional status’ and characterizes the procedure as ‘disfavored treatment.’ However, the procedure specifies that the provisional ballots will be counted for federal elections, and provisional voting will not result in the voters’ removal from voter rolls. The Alliance fails to explain how the procedure ‘disfavors’ its members.”
“In sum, the Alliance fails to show it has a right to intervene, in that it has failed to demonstrate an interest, which is properly related to this limited enforcement action, that was not adequately represented by the parties in this action,” Myers concluded about Elias’ clients.
Myers also rejected arguments from the DNC and Elias’ clients about the potential release of private voter information to the federal government, labeling the claims “speculative and premature.”
“No party disputes that the United States has made no request for the information described in the Disclosure Clause,” the judge wrote. “If it does so in the future, the State Board has expressed its ‘inten[t] to seek a protective order similar to protective orders entered in other actions in which similar records were disclosed as part of litigation,’ and ‘anticipates that any such request would include the same or similar protective provisions to what is contemplated by the DNC in their moving papers.’ To the extent that they are properly presented, the court will accept and consider briefs filed by amici curiae with any motion(s) for protective order filed in this case.”
“Thus, in this regard, the court finds the proposed intervenors have failed to demonstrate that they have a claimed interest in the subject of this enforcement action and are so situated that disposition may impair or impede their ability to protect such interest,” Myers explained.
“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,” Myers wrote in a 13-page order in September accepting the settlement between federal and state government agencies.
“State Board Defendants, their agents, employees, contractors, successors, and all other persons representing the interest of State Board Defendants are required to ensure that North Carolina’s voter registration forms and instructions and the State’s HAVA List used for elections for Federal office fully complies with Section 303(a)(5) of HAVA,” Myers wrote. “State Board Defendants are further enjoined from engaging in any act or practice that fails to comply with the requirements of Section 303(a) of HAVA.”
Myers’ order described a remedial plan the state elections board is pursuing to collect missing voter registration information. Voters with incomplete information will be required to cast a provisional ballot when they head to the polls.
“State Board Defendants will instruct the county boards of elections that for all provisional ballots issued pursuant to Paragraph 6(c), the vote cast for each Federal office on the provisional ballot will be counted, notwithstanding the presence of or validation of identification information supplied by the voter on the provisional ballot form , so long as the voter is otherwise eligible to vote under state law,” Myers wrote.
“The provisional voting process … shall not, by itself, result in any voter being removed from the official list of registered voters in state or Federal elections in North Carolina,” he added.
Myers called for reports from the state elections board in October, December, and February, along with an annual report starting in April 2026.
“This Order is final and binding between the United States and State Board Defendants and their successors in office regarding the claims raised in this action,” the judge wrote. The order remains in effect through June 2027.
The Justice Department and state elections board filed a joint motion for a court order ending the lawsuit.
“If approved, the proposed Order would resolve litigation brought by the United States pursuant to its authority to enforce the requirements of Section 303(a) of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (‘HAVA’), with respect to the conduct of elections for Federal office in the State of North Carolina,” according to the document signed by lawyers from the federal Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the North Carolina Department of Justice.
The document spelled out actions the elections board must take to comply with the deal.
“The State Board Defendants will contact voters registered using an application that did not comply with HAVA or whose record in the HAVA List lacks the required HAVA identification number, to obtain the required information needed to update the record,” according to the document. “Consistent with HAVA’s requirement that all voter registration information be timely entered into the HAVA List, the State Board Defendants will make any update to a record in the HAVA List on an expedited basis after receiving the update, as defined in the proposed Order.”
The state elections board will ensure county elections boards and staff “receive appropriate training and instructions” on HAVA compliance. The state board will also monitor HAVA compliance.
Voters with updated registration records “will vote by regular ballot” in upcoming elections. Those without updated records will cast provisional ballots. “The State Board Defendants will instruct the county boards of elections that for all provisional ballots issued pursuant to paragraph 6(c) only, the vote cast for each Federal office on the provisional ballot will be counted so long as the voter is otherwise eligible to vote under state law,” according to the document. “The provisional voting process outlined in Paragraph 6 shall not, by itself, result in any voter being removed from the official list of registered voters in state or Federal elections in North Carolina.”
“At the outset of this litigation, the records of approximately 100,000 voters lacked a driver’s license or the last four digits of the voter’s social security number as required by HAVA,” federal and state government lawyers wrote. “As of September 2, 2025, that number is 81,810 and dropping as the State Board continues its efforts to collect this information from affected registrants.”
The Justice Department and State Board of Elections urged Myers to deny motions from outside groups to intervene in the case.
The Republican National Committee and North Carolina Republican Party filed suit in August 2024 challenging the former Democrat-majority elections board’s handling of the voter registrations discussed in the Justice Department suit.
The GOP complaint challenged 225,000 voter registrations linked to a disputed voter registration form. Republican groups asked for the affected voters to be dropped from the voting rolls or required to cast a provisional ballot in the 2024 general election.
Courts refused to force the elections board to take that step.
Republican state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin later raised the same issue in ballot challenges after the election. Trailing Democrat Allison Riggs by 734 votes, Griffin challenged more than 65,000 votes cast in the contest. More than 60,000 of those ballots involved voters whose registration records appeared to lack the required HAVA information.
The state Supreme Court ultimately decided that those votes would count in the final election tally. Griffin conceded the election after Myers declined to support a “cure” process that would have affected ballots Griffin challenged for other reasons.
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“Repair project has completed 32,000 NC voter registration records” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.
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