Since graduating from Duke in 2022, Julianna Rennie has moved every single year. Voting while frequently changing addresses has been a challenge; she skipped voting in the Oct. 7 primary election because she’d changed precincts since the last election.
She suspects that this consistent shuffle landed her on the list of voters the state Board of Elections has ordered to “repair” their voter registration. Approximately 4,144 Durhamites were on the list, the fourth-highest tally in the state, exceeded only by Wake, Mecklenburg and Guilford counties. While the voters have been sent letters instructing them to update their registrations, as of Oct. 15, with the November election just weeks away, only 358 of those Durham voters have done so.
Rennie is one of the 358. She updated her registration in early August when her politically proactive partner looked up both of their names using the state board’s search tool.
“It was great to have someone looking out for me,” Rennie said. “Voter disenfranchisement affects a lot of people, especially students and people like me who move frequently.”
Statewide, nearly 100,000 voters are on the state Board of Election’s Registration Repair Project list. The voter registrations in question lack either a social security number, an N.C. driver’s license number or an ID number from the state Division of Motor Vehicles, according to the state board.
Echoes of an earlier list
Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to increasing voter registration and turnout, explained that the list of affected people contains several subsets of different voters.
“There are a lot of college students on this list. There’s also lifelong voters, and they’re concentrated in some of the major cities like Durham and Greensboro. It seems to me, this list lines up with a lot of the voters that were attempting to be challenged in the Griffin campaign.”
Republican Jefferson Griffin narrowly lost to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs in the race for state Supreme Court in 2024. Griffin then attempted to overturn the results, arguing that over 60,000 ballots should be thrown out because the voters’ registrations lacked required information. A federal judge rejected Griffin’s challenge, and Riggs was reelected to her seat on the court.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice sued the state over its “inaccurate voting list.”
In June, the state Board of Elections shifted from Democratic to Republican control. The next month, the board launched the Registration Repair Project. The project later became part of the settlement to dismiss the Trump administration’s lawsuit.
Duke senior Ali Fishman is one of the students impacted by the project. She was unaware of the need to update her voter registration until contacted by The 9th Street Journal. While the state Board of Elections sent out letters to all impacted voters in mid-August, Fishman claims she never received one.
“I’m a regular voter, and I was shocked to find out I would’ve needed to update my voter registration,” Fishman said. “It feels like they’re trying to purposely isolate people from voting, just making it as hard as possible.”
‘Durham County is the bullseye’
Susan Sewell, a Durham resident and Precinct 40 chair for the state Democratic Party, agrees. She criticized the project as partisan and unnecessary.
“Durham County is the bullseye because it’s the most Democratic county. They want to get rid of our votes,” said Sewell.
Derek Bowens, director of the Durham County Board of Elections, said that even if voters fail to repair their registration before showing up at the polls, they will still be allowed to vote.
“If you present to vote in person and you were on registration repair list, you would need to vote provisionally,” Bowens said.
A provisional ballot is a temporary ballot issued to a voter without sufficient identifying information or a voter who is at the incorrect precinct. Those ballots are cross-referenced with existing databases, and in some cases, voters must return to “cure” a ballot by presenting a valid photo ID within three days.
If provisional ballots are “cured,” they can be counted.
In the October municipal primary elections, Durham County cast over 68% of provisional ballots statewide, far exceeding the number of provisional ballots in the other 17 counties with local elections. Bowens said he is confident about Durham County’s ability to process the increased number of provisional ballots.
“We have all the capacity we need,” he said. “In the 2024 general election, we processed 2,387 provisional ballots. So we’ve seen the highest of peaks when it comes to provisionals, and we certainly will have the capacity to provide that to any voter.”
In past elections, though, substantial numbers of provisional ballots ended up going uncounted.
Fellman would discourage any voter from simply waiting to cast a provisional ballot rather than repairing their registration now.
“[Provisional ballots] take time and money from poll workers,” Fellman said. “It takes longer to go to that help desk and vote provisionally. The onus can be on the voter to then follow up if they need to provide additional information.
“We want votes to count right away and not have to have all of that administration that goes into verifying all these provisional ballots on Election Day.”
To check if you need to repair your registration in Durham County, visit this dashboard; for the entire state, check this search tool. You can update your voter registration through payments.ncdot.gov, by visiting your county board of elections office, or by filling out the original form provided by the state Board of Elections and mailing it to the board.
