The State Board of Elections approved new rules on Thursday aimed at removing “potential noncitizens” from voter rolls by using a federal database. The 3-2 vote along party lines came after the board postponed the decision in March.
“You’ve done an awesome job of putting a tuxedo on a pig,” said Board Member Jeff Carmon. “But I stand by what I said earlier: This is still a pig.”
Under the new rules, the state will now use a federal tool — the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool — to challenge “potential noncitizens” on voter registration rolls. Once the state board flags people as “potential noncitizens,” county boards of election will be responsible for following up on each case.
At the meeting, state board staff said they planned to upload the North Carolina voter database to SAVE within days.
The board received more than 15,000 public comments on the issue ahead of its March 18 meeting.
Those opposed voiced concerns over consequences for naturalized citizens and their children, administrative burdens on county elections boards and inaccuracies in the SAVE system, which erroneously flagged voters in Texas and Missouri.
In response, the board made several changes to the rules, including switching the language from “presumptive noncitizen” to “potential noncitizen.”
Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, praised the revisions in an interview, but she still qualms with the new process.
“Because of the myriad of reliability issues with the SAVE system that are pretty well-documented, we still remain concerned that eligible voters, particularly naturalized citizens, are going to be unnecessarily targeted by any challenge process,” she said.
In addition to the new phrase “potential noncitizen,” the board made other changes. If a person is identified as a “potential noncitizen,” the State Board of Elections will first check whether it already has information indicating that person is a citizen. If not, only then will the verification process begin. Also, children of naturalized citizens, who derive citizenship automatically, will be allowed to show documentation of a parent’s citizenship status as proof of their eligibility to vote.
At the county level, once a local elections board receives a voter’s name from the state, it will check its own records for any existing proof of citizenship. If one is not available, the county will send a formal notice to the voter by email and in print. Voters will be given at least 10 business days to respond (up from 5 days), but no more than 20.
“Potential noncitizens” can also submit documentation to their county elections board before their preliminary hearing. If the county board can’t confirm that the challenged voter received the notice, the board will postpone the hearing to a later date and send another notification.
Board Member Siobhan O’Duffy Millen asked Adam Steele, the board’s associate general counsel, whether someone could be removed from voter rolls solely based on a SAVE flag, if they never appear before their county board.
“I don’t think you could just take them off,” Steele said, adding there would have to be other reasons to remove the person, such as a felony conviction.
The new rules place the burden and expense of proof on the voter, Millen said. As of 2024, 9 percent of American citizens of voting age lack readily available proof of citizenship, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report.
“An expense accruing to a voter to prove citizenship in order to keep his already-present right to vote is pretty much the definition of a poll tax,” she said.
The board members debated what member Stacy Eggers described as a “philosophical question:” Is it necessary to verify the citizenship of already-registered voters?
“Our obligation is to the accuracy of our records,” Eggers said. “An ineligible voter is the same problem as someone who is denied to vote. Those are two sides of the same coin.”
Eggers argued that the new rules guarantee due process and that the majority of voters flagged in the database will likely be verified as citizens right away.
“It’s just amazing to me that we have a situation where the answer is simply, ‘don’t verify citizenship’ when we have the tools available to verify citizenship,” he said.
Jeff Carmon disagreed.
“I think we’re tone-deaf,” Carmon said. “We are now saying you have to carry your papers…you have to show your papers to prove you’re a citizen of this country so you can vote.”
An audit by the State Board found that in the 2016 general election, 41 ineligible noncitizens voted out of 4.8 million N.C. voters.
Carmon said that 41 noncitizen voters didn’t warrant changes of this magnitude and recalled more recent elections with “little to no issues.”
Voter registration and engagement are bigger issues more deserving of state attention and limited resources, Klein said. North Carolina has about 7.7 million registered voters, of whom 73.7% turned out in the 2024 general election.
“North Carolina elections, including statewide elections, can be notoriously close, and so it could have a real impact if eligible voters are erroneously removed,” she said. “We’re always worried about the chilling effect of this — that naturalized citizens won’t even want to register to vote if they think they’ll be accused of being a noncitizen afterwards.”
Thursday’s meeting was not a public hearing. Still, Chair Francis De Luca allowed one front-row audience member, Deborah Oronzio, to come to the microphone. Oronzio said that on rule two, which establishes the process for notifying a challenged voter, she counted 12,000 comments against and only 250 in favor.
“I can go on with those other numbers, but I don’t really believe I have to,” she said.
In the end, Eggers, De Luca, and Angela Hawkins voted to adopt the rules, which will go into effect in June after approval by the board’s rules committee.
“I think this is a good thing, and we need to move forward,” De Luca said.
Sophie Endrud
