Legislation passed in 2023 addressed the problem of election officials accepting ballots from nonexistent registrations (due to verification failure). A federal lawsuit settlement threatens to bring that problem back.
The “ghost voter” problem
The John Locke Foundation’s review of the 2020 election noted a problem with some same-day registrations (SDRs). Unlike all other registrations, some SDRs did not have to be verified by election officials. If those registrations remained unverified, they would be removed from voter rolls, but the ballots associated with those removed registrations would still be counted. In other words, ballots were counted from voters who did not exist.
A public records request revealed 1,760 such “ghost voters” in the 2020 election. The unverified rate for SDRs (1.82%) was almost twice as high as the unverified rate for non-SDR new registrations (0.95%). A 2008 Civitas Institute report found a similar nonverification rate.
While that is not a large number of ballots, it is worth remembering that fewer than a thousand votes have decided two state Supreme Court races over the past five years. A relatively small number of ballots from nonexistent voters could overturn election results.
Fixing the ghost voter problem
The General Assembly addressed the ghost voter problem in 2023:
Another problem with the SDR ghost voters is that same-day registrants are treated differently from other registrants. A person with an unverified regular registration would not be able to vote. Why should unverified SDRs be treated differently?
For those reasons, the ghost voter problem needed to be fixed. That fix came as an addition to Senate Bill 747 in 2023. The amended bill required county elections boards to “confirm same-day registrations (SDR) during early voting the same way they confirm all other voter registrations in order for a ballot associated with an SDR to be counted.”
So, all registrants are treated equally since election officials must confirm that they still live where they claim to live before making their registrations official.
The reform was implemented in the 2024 election without significant problems.
Return of the ghost voters?
Of course, there were lawsuits over the reform ending ghost voters.
US District Judge Thomas Schroeder signed an agreement on April 28 to end lawsuits from several Democratic groups against the State Board of Elections and Republican intervening defendants. The agreement allows the state to retain the practice of rejecting ballots from unverified registrations, but implements a cure process for affected registrants:
A voter targeted by the undeliverable mail provision “must be permitted to remedy the address verification failure with documentation submitted in person, by mail, by email, or by fax,” the court filing continued. “The documentation must be received by 5 p.m. on the day before county canvass; provided, however, that a voter who is unable to provide the documentation by this deadline may also provide documentation in person at the county canvass, or may address the county board at the county canvass.”
Election officials also would be blocked from removing a same-day voter’s ballot if it’s “returned by the Postal Service as undeliverable after the close of business on the second business day before the county canvass.”
The county canvas is ten days after election day.
This agreement will not be too much of a problem if election officials require documents confirming that the registrant resided in North Carolina on election day. Simply resubmitting documents indicating residency at some point before submitting the same-day registration application should not be considered sufficient.
More problematic are the ballots that will be accepted from unverified registrations without even a cure process.
One longstanding problem with verifying same-day registrations is that local election officials do not always begin the registration verification process in a timely manner. This is a problem that state officials have known since at least 2016:
The State Board of Elections is keenly aware that a number of same-day registrants fail mail verification after the county has completed its canvass. It is imperative that counties work diligently to issue verification mailings and log returned mail throughout the one-stop early voting period.
The roughly 1,760 ghost voters in the 2020 election show that the problem was not corrected until the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 747 in 2023.
Fixing the ghost voter problem by modifying or eliminating same-day registration
There is little doubt that the agreement signed by Judge Schroeder will cause ghost voters to return to North Carolina elections. The question is whether the number of ghost voters will be in the dozens or hundreds per election. The first big test of that question will be the 2026 general election.
If legislators find that the number of ghost voters created under this agreement is intolerable, they have two options:
- End same-day registration by the last Thursday before election day and require counties to begin the registration verification process by the following Friday. That would reduce the number of ghost voters, but is unlikely to eliminate them.
- Eliminate new same-day registration, allowing it only to update existing registrations.
