North Carolina’s plan to scrub voter rolls has been a disaster in other states | Opinion
North Carolina is prepared to partner with the Trump administration to scrub alleged noncitizens from its voter rolls — an unnecessary effort that will almost certainly create more problems than it solves.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has proposed a set of rules outlining the use of government records and databases, most notably the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, to flag and remove “presumptive noncitizens” from the state’s voter rolls. The board is currently negotiating a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to feed potentially millions of voters at a time into SAVE in search of noncitizens, The News & Observer previously reported.
Other states, such as Texas, have already begun working with DHS to mass-verify the citizenship status of their voters through SAVE. Election officials cite this as a reason why North Carolina should join in. The problem is, many of those states have encountered serious issues with the database.
“After running its entire voter list — more than 18 million records — through the SAVE database, the office identified 2,724 potential noncitizens registered to vote in Texas,” Executive Director Sam Hayes said in a press release.
That’s only 0.015% of the state’s registered voters. But the real number of noncitizen voters in Texas is even smaller than that, because the SAVE database keeps making mistakes, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. In Texas, the database incorrectly flagged hundreds of voters as potential noncitizens, with one county reporting an error rate of at least 14%.
Missouri had similar problems. In St. Louis County, the state’s most populous county, around 35% of those initially flagged by SAVE were in fact registered at naturalization ceremonies, The New York Times reported. In Boone County, home to the University of Missouri, more than half the voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
Meanwhile, the efforts have yielded little evidence of actual noncitizen voting. Out of the 49 million registrations checked across numerous states so far, the Trump administration believes it has found around 10,000 registered noncitizen voters. That’s about 0.2%. It’s unclear how many of them actually ever voted in an election.
Given the flaws of the SAVE database, the new rules proposed by North Carolina election officials raise concerns. Under the proposed rules, the burden is placed on the voter to prove they are a citizen, rather than on the government to prove that they are not. If the SAVE database flags a registered voter as a potential non-citizen, the county board of elections would contact that voter by mail to inform them of the challenge to their voter registration. That correspondence would only be provided in English. A formal hearing would be held, at which point the voter would have the opportunity to provide proof of citizenship. If that voter does not receive the mailed notice, cannot attend the hearing or cannot easily access proof of citizenship documentation, like a passport or birth certificate, then their voter registration can be cancelled.
It’s easy to see how someone could mistakenly be labeled a noncitizen and forced to jump through hoops to prove citizenship, or even be removed from the voter rolls without ever knowing about it. That could disproportionately affect naturalized citizens, women who changed their name after marriage and rural voters. Since falsely claiming citizenship when registering to vote is illegal, being incorrectly flagged by the SAVE system could subject someone to criminal investigation, which has prompted at least one lawsuit in Texas. There are further concerns about privacy and data security, as well as the potential for the findings to be shared across government agencies for immigration enforcement.
Republicans on the State Board of Elections insist the new rules are necessary for “strengthening election integrity.” But there nothing to suggest that our electoral system lacks integrity in the first place, and there’s simply no integrity to be found in a process that disenfranchises eligible voters. That doesn’t strengthen our democracy — it only weakens it.
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten is covering the 2026 elections for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
