NC to feed voter data to Homeland Security under new noncitizen removal rules
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- NC elections board approved rules to allow uploading voter rolls to DHS as soon as Friday.
- Rules let officials challenge voters flagged by SAVE system as potential noncitizens.
- Board amended rules to expand acceptable documents and give voters more time to respond.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections on Thursday approved a new process for partnering with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to remove potential noncitizens from the voter rolls.
The rules, which the board’s Republican majority passed in a 3-2 vote, formalize the board’s new agreement with Homeland Security, which will run potentially millions of voters at a time through its citizenship databases.
The state could begin uploading voter data to DHS as early as Friday.
The board’s two Democrats fiercely opposed the rules, saying they did not trust DHS to provide the state with accurate data and believed it could disenfranchise eligible voters.
“We are now saying you have to carry your papers,” board member Jeff Carmon said.
The board’s Republicans defended the rules, saying challenged voters would be given adequate due process.
“What I hear from my colleagues on the other side of the fence is that we should trust in human nature and that people will just simply do the right thing,” board member Stacy “Four” Eggers said. “That’s a nice thought — but it is not something that is a reality.”
Under the new rules, voters flagged by DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE system, would have their eligibility officially challenged by election officials if the state or county can find no record of their citizenship. From there, they would be required to provide proof of their citizenship, or risk having their registration cancelled.
The rules state that counties should confirm a challenged voter has received the notice of their challenge and give them an opportunity to respond before they remove them from the rolls.
“Nothing happens unless we get notice delivered to that person,” the board’s chief of staff, Brian LiVecchi, told reporters, adding that affected voters would be contacted by multiple methods.
A vote had originally been scheduled for last month on the rules, but the board delayed the item after receiving over 14,000 public comments both online and at a heated in-person hearing.
The board amended the rules based on some of the criticism it received from the public, including by expanding the types of documents challenged voters can use to prove their citizenship and giving them more time to respond.
Critics have called the rules unnecessary, noting that numerous studies have found that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, despite repeated, unfounded claims from President Donald Trump and Republicans of widespread voter fraud.
In an audit of North Carolina’s 2016 general election, officials found 41 cases of noncitizens casting a ballot out of over 4.7 million total votes cast.
Criticism has also focused on the SAVE system, which has historically been used only to confirm eligibility for government benefits. Since taking office, the Trump administration has pushed states to instead use the system to find noncitizens on their voter rolls.
In the 2016 election audit, the State Board of Elections concluded that a match with the SAVE database was “not a reliable indicator that a person is not a U.S. citizen.”
The audit detailed several problems with the database, including infrequent updates and issues with naturalized citizens or those who derived citizenship from adoption incorrectly showing up as noncitizens.
The rules approved Thursday would allow challenged voters to show documentation of their parents’ citizenship in order to prove their eligibility.
This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 12:33 PM.
