Mecklenburg has ‘implausibly high’ voter-registration rate, lawsuit claims
A nationwide legal fight over who can vote resurfaced in North Carolina on Thursday as a conservative group sued the key swing state and two of its largest counties, claiming that tens of thousands of ineligible voters remain on their rolls.
State and local election officials — including Mecklenburg County Elections Director Michael Dickerson — said the allegations are untrue and based on outdated or inaccurate statistics.
The complaint by Judicial Watch lists Mecklenburg and Dickerson among the defendants, alleging that disparities between the county’s voter registration and population numbers show Dickerson and his staff have failed to maintain accurate voting rolls.
The suit appears seven months before the pivotal 2020 election. It accuses the state and Mecklenburg and Guilford counties of failing to comply with the voter maintenance requirements of National Voter Registration Act, thus threatening to undermine “the integrity of an election by increasing the opportunity for improper voting.”
Judicial Watch says Mecklenburg and Guilford were among 378 counties nationwide that it claims have “implausibly high” voter-registration rates.
Mecklenburg, the complaint alleges, has more than 116,000 inactive voters on its rolls who should be removed. According to Judicial Watch, that means the state’s most populous county had 7 percent more registered voters than voting-age residents 18 and older.
In an interview with the Observer on Thursday, Dickerson disputed those figures and said his office maintains accurate registration lists.
“I don’t know where they got their numbers, but we are doing the job, following all the procedures,” Dickerson said. “And yes, it’s very important that we (only) have people on the books who are allowed to vote, and if there’s an issue that we take care of it.”
In a December letter to Judicial Watch, state Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell, who is also listed as a defendant, said North Carolina follows state and federal law in maintaining its voter rolls and that Judicial Watch had not shown that a violation had occurred.
Given how the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the election year into chaos, one of the state’s leading voter advocates derided the timing of the lawsuit in strong terms.
“Pushing a voter purge and voter suppression, well it’s despicable even when there’s not a global pandemic. When there is, it’s something else entirely,” said Allison Riggs, interim executive director and chief counsel for voting rights for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham.
“If their data wasn’t bad — and it is absolutely bad — it would still be morally bankrupt to file this at a time when we’re trying to figure out how people can safely register and vote.”
She said Judicial Watch’s lawsuit uses “widely debunked” numbers that inflate the number of registered voters but do not reflect population changes in fast-growing counties such as Mecklenburg, leading to inaccurately high ratios of voters to residents.
Court fights over voting eligibility and watershed election issues such as Voter ID have flared up in a number of states. According to the progressive Brennan Center for Justice, 17 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2016 and 2018.
Republicans supporting more restrictive election laws say they are protecting the public from widespread voting irregularities. As recently as this week, President Donald Trump said Wisconsin voters were rightly required to vote in person despite the spreading pandemic because write-in ballots lend themselves to fraud.
Democrats say voting restrictions mostly put in place by Republican-controlled state legislatures disproportionately impact the poor, minorities and other groups more likely to vote for their party.
If widespread fraud is occurring in North Carolina, no one can seem to find it. A study by the bipartisan N.C. Board of Elections found that one vote out of the 4.8 million cast statewide in the 2016 election would have been thrown out had Voter ID been in place.
Overall, the board found that about 500 ineligible votes were cast, mostly by felons who officials believe did not know they were banned from voting while still on probation.
In fact, what many have described as the worst case of election fraud in state history occurred during the 2018 Republican primary for the 9th District congressional seat.
Judicial Watch has long aligned itself with Trump on wide range of issues including immigration and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
In December, the group sent warning letters to California and four swing states — Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — as well as some of their biggest counties threatening to sue within 90 days unless they removed “millions of extra registrants” from their voter lists.
Under state and federal law, states and counties must update their rolls at least twice a year, removing the names of those who have died, moved out of state or committed a felony. Voters can also be declared inactive and eventually removed if they fail to respond to address-confirmation notices and do not vote in the next two federal elections over a four-year period.
In North Carolina, inactive voters can still take part in elections if they can verify their addresses at the polls.
According to Judicial Watch, Mecklenburg is lagging in updating its voter list. It claims the state’s biggest county removed an average of 11,000 voters per year during the last reporting period.
Dickerson says the county actually removed almost 59,000 names in 2019 alone.
He also disputed Judicial Watch’s claim that Mecklenburg has more registered voters than voting-age residents. Based on 2018 Census estimate, Mecklenburg had almost 1.1 million residents, of which some 835,000 were 18 and older.
About 88 percent, or 732,000 residents, are registered to vote — not the 107 percent alleged by the complaint, he said.
This story was originally published April 10, 2020 at 6:30 AM with the headline "Mecklenburg has ‘implausibly high’ voter-registration rate, lawsuit claims."
