A retirees group working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm wants to intervene in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against North Carolina and its State Board of Elections. The suit accuses the state board of maintaining inaccurate voter rolls.
The North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans filed a motion Monday to intervene in the case as a defendant. Lawyers from the Elias Law Group help represent the alliance.
“In both the run up to — and fallout from — the November 2024 general election, various partisan actors filed litigation seeking to cast a shadow over North Carolina’s voter rolls,” the alliance’s lawyers wrote. “The Republican National Committee, for example, filed suit just a few months before the election, seeking to have hundreds of thousands of people removed from the voter rolls because the North Carolina’s statewide voter file did not contain either a driver’s license or social security number for them.”
“Similarly, in the wake of the 2024 election, Judge Jefferson Griffin — a losing candidate for a state Supreme Court seat — sought to have tens of thousands of ballots invalidated for a similar reason,” the court filing continued. “Despite searching high and low, however, neither of these cases turned up a scrap of evidence that North Carolina’s voter rolls are not secure or contain ineligible voters.”
“Now the federal government has joined the fray, echoing the alarmist tone of these past suits,” the alliance’s lawyers argued. “It alleges that North Carolina is not complying with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election officials to collect certain identification numbers from applicants who have them. The federal government concedes that North Carolina’s current voter registration form requires applicants to provide this information, but it alleges that it did not previously, and as a result many long-time voters registered without providing that information.”
The Justice Department “has wholly failed to concretely identify any specific voter who was registered contrary to HAVA, and instead simply assumes as much based on imperfect statewide records,” the court filing added.
“Despite its paltry allegations, the federal government asks this Court to force North Carolina to engage in a herculean data-collection process, contacting every single voter in the state whose registration file appears to be missing information and then collecting that information,” the alliance argued. “The inevitable consequence of the federal government’s lawsuit is clear: voters who cannot be contacted stand to be kicked off the rolls, even if they complied with HAVA when they registered or never had to comply with HAVA at all. The federal government’s paper-thin allegations do not warrant the heavy-handed relief it seeks, which will invariably lead to thousands of eligible North Carolinians losing their registration status.”
The Justice Department filed suit on May 27.
“Accurate voter registration rolls are critical to ensure that elections in North Carolina are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in a news release. “The Department of Justice will not hesitate to file suit against jurisdictions thatmaintain inaccurate voter registration rolls in violation of federal voting laws.”
“We are still reviewing the complaint,” state elections director Sam Hayes said in a prepared statement to Carolina Journal on May 27, “but the failure to collect the information required by HAVA has been well documented. Rest assured that I am committed to bringing North Carolina into compliance with federal law.”
The suit referenced President Donald Trump’s March 25 executive order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order aimed “to ensure that elections are being held in compliance with federal laws that guard against illegal voting, unlawful discrimination, and other forms of fraud, error, or suspicion,” according to the lawsuit.
“The cornerstone of public trust in government lies in free and fair elections. The core of the compact between a state and its citizens rests in ensuring that only eligible citizens can vote in elections,” the complaint continued.
“Defendants have failed to maintain accurate lists in North Carolina’s computerized statewide voter registration in violation of Section 303(a)(5) of HAVA and the sacred trust that the people of the State of North Carolina have put in them to ensure the fairness and integrity of elections for Federal office in the state, necessitating this litigation,” according to the lawsuit.
The suit names the state, the elections board, all five individual members, and Hayes. Hayes took office on May 15, eight days after a newly constituted State Board of Elections ousted former director Karen Brinson Bell.
With new Republican members Francis De Luca and Robert Rucho, the board also flipped from a 3-2 Democratic majority to a 3-2 Republican majority. State Auditor Dave Boliek, also a Republican, made the appointments under authority granted to him in 2024’s Senate Bill 382.
Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, is challenging the law shifting elections appointments from his office to the auditor. The state Supreme Court issued a May 23 order allowing Boliek to maintain his appointment power while the case proceeds through the state Court of Appeals.
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 new federal suit.
The GOP complaint challenged 225,000 voter registrations linked to the disputed 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 his 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 a federal judge declined to support a “cure” process that would have affected ballots Griffin challenged for other reasons.
