Judge approves RNC, DNC, elections board deal ending registration case

A federal judge has approved a deal among Republican and Democratic Party organizations, along with North Carolina’s state elections board, to end a lawsuit over incomplete voter registration records.

Chief US District Judge Richard Myers signed an order Wednesday. It was posted Friday. The order ends the legal battle state and national GOP groups initiated in 2024 over North Carolina voter registration records.

The Republican suit targeted voter records that lacked information required by the federal Help America Vote Act. The GOP cited 225,000 voter registration records that appeared to lack a HAVA-mandated drivers’ license number or last four digits of a Social Security number.

The Republican National Committee, Democratic National Committee, and State Board of Elections filed a motion Monday in federal court to end the dispute.

The 22-page agreement spelled out how election officials would deal with registered voters whose records lack the HAVA-required information.

State and local elections would be “permanently enjoined” from registering voters in the future if they don’t provide HAVA-compliant numbers.

The state board would continue to pursue its Registration Repair Project to complete incomplete voter registrations. More than 70,000 voters are now listed on the project’s web page. Elections officials would be permanently enjoined from denying a ballot from voters with missing data who are not listed as part of the project.

Voters on the list who request and vote absentee ballots will be removed from the list. Voters on the list who vote early can cast a provisional ballot, and none of them will be denied a chance to vote.

“A Subject Voter’s ballot – whether absentee, provisional, or otherwise – must be counted in federal races,” according to the agreement, even if they have not provided the missing information or a HAVA-compliant voter ID.

Republican groups recently dropped state Supreme Court appeals in this case and a related case, both called Kivett v. North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Both disputes had ties to the disputed 2024 state Supreme Court contest.

Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat and an appointed incumbent, had to wait until May 2025 to be certified as the winner of the November 2024 election. She defeated Jefferson Griffin, a Republican state Appeals Court judge, by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast.

Griffin challenged the results in state and federal court. He questioned more than 65,000 ballots cast statewide. Most were cast by voters with registration records that appeared to lack federally required driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Griffin’s challenges also focused on overseas voters who provided no photo identification and “never residents,” voters who checked a box on a voter form indicating they had never lived in North Carolina.

The State Board of Elections certified Riggs as the winner after Myers issued a May 5, 2025, order ending the election dispute. Myers rejected a state Supreme Court decision in April 2025 that placed at least 1,675 and as many as 5,700 ballots from the 2024 election in question.

In the Kivett case that led to the settlement, GOP lawyers challenged the state elections board’s voter registration practices.

“For over a decade the NCSBE employed a voter registration form which failed to collect the applicant’s driver’s license number or their social security number,” according to a February 2025 Supreme Court petition. “The NCSBE recognized this failure when it changed the statewide registration form on a forward-looking basis. However, the NCSBE repeatedly refused to contact any of the individuals who returned statutorily deficient registration forms. As a result, approximately 225,000 people are erroneously deemed ‘registered’ to vote in the state, despite each one failing to provide the driver’s license or a social security number required by law.”

Republican groups filed both Kivett cases while Democrats held a 3-2 majority on the State Board of Elections. Senate Bill 382, approved after the 2024 election, transferred election board appointments from the governor to the state auditor. Then-Gov. Roy Cooper and his successor, Gov. Josh Stein, are Democrats. Auditor Dave Boliek is a Republican.

Boliek used his appointments in 2025 to flip the elections board to a 3-2 Republican majority.

The US Justice Department sued the elections board last spring over the issue of incomplete voter registration records. The suit focused on the same HAVA compliance issues Republicans raised in their 2024 lawsuit. Justice Department lawyers and the Republican-led state elections board reached a settlement of that suit last September. The board’s ongoing Registration Repair Project is designed to fill in gaps in voters’ registration information.

“Judge approves RNC, DNC, elections board deal ending registration case” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.