As NC pursues noncitizen voting, citizens may lose their right to vote | Opinion

The State Board of Elections under its new Republican leadership is acting on President Donald Trump’s delusion that he twice lost the popular vote because of heavy voting by noncitizens.

The board’s three Republicans dismissed objections by its two Democrats by voting on April 16 to feed information on the state’s 7.7 million voters into a federal database to look for noncitizens who are illegally registered to vote. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal or state elections.

The database run by the Department of Homeland Security, is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE). It’s used to check the citizenship of applicants for federal benefits. Under an order from Trump, SAVE has been revved up with additional personal data from Social Security so it can check voter registration rolls.

If the experience of other states is a guide, the verification process will turn up a minuscule number of noncitizens registered to vote in North Carolina while also flagging many voters who are citizens.

A Texas Tribune-Propublica investigation found that SAVE made errors, usually involving immigrants who obtained a Social Security number before they became citizens.

Missouri’s experience with the SAVE system prompted election officials from 70 counties to send a letter to the House speaker about voters being incorrectly flagged as noncitizens.

“These lists are deeply flawed: they are outdated, inaccurate, and include individuals we know to be U.S. citizens, our neighbors, colleagues, and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies,” the election officials said.

Brooks Fuller, policy director for North Carolina Common Cause, expects the same result in North Carolina, a state that is home to more than 450,000 naturalized citizens.

Voters who are flagged will be asked by mail to provide proof of citizenship to their local board of elections.

Fuller said the process could run into trouble given a tight deadline, uncertainty among county election boards about how to clear flagged voters, notices that get misdirected in the mail, and wrongly flagged voters who are citizens but decide not to provide documentation out of frustration.

Fuller said a voter wrongly identified may not get the notice, may think it’s not real or “might throw up his hands and say, ‘I’m not going to go through this.’ Then you’ve needlessly taken away someone’s right to vote.”

Since federal law bars voter list revisions within 90 days of an election, North Carolina’s verification process must be completed by Aug. 5. Meeting that deadline could be a challenge for local boards and flagged voters alike.

The potential damage from this verification process is not worth the effort or the expense. An audit of North Carolina’s 2016 general election found 41 noncitizens voted out of more than 4.7 million total votes cast.

The Texas Tribune reported that seven states that ran a total of about 35 million registered voters through the SAVE system identified 4,200 as noncitizens – about 0.01% of registered voters. Of that tiny group, some may not have voted.

“Noncitizen voting is a myth, it is vanishingly rare,” Fuller said. “This is the proverbial killing a mosquito with a shotgun.”

And wounding the right to vote.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com