Election Officials In Critical Swing State Remove Nearly 750,000 From Voter Rolls

On Thursday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced that it had removed 747,274 registrants from the voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. The North Carolina legislature passed a series of election integrity bills last year to ensure that Americans have confidence in the electoral process this November.

The board's "list maintenance" resulted in about half of the 747,000 registrants being removed because they had died or moved. A large majority of the remaining registered voters were removed because they had not voted in an election in several years. An even smaller percentage of the nearly three-quarters of a million voters were removed because they were convicted felons or because they asked to no longer be registered. The election board also found nine registrants who were non-citizens.

According to WRAL, the legislature passed election integrity legislation last year thanks to the North Carolina Election Integrity Network led by Jim Womack. In a statement to the outlet, Womack explained that stopping non-citizens from being on the voter rolls is a simple fix. "The best way to make sure there's no non-citizens is to actually require proof of citizenship when you sign up to vote," he said. "Arizona does it. But North Carolina is one of the many states that do not."

North Carolina isn't the only state that has recently taken action to clean the voter rolls and remove non-citizens. As previously reported by the DC Enquirer, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced that over one million ineligible voters, some of whom were non-citizens, were removed from the state's voter rolls last month.

From the over 1.1 million registrations that the secretary of state's office removed, 6,500 were non-citizens, over 457,000 were deceased individuals, over 463,000 were voters on the suspense list, over 134,000 voters who had responded to an address confirmation notice, over 65,000 who failed to respond to an address notice, and over 19,000 who requested that their voter registration be canceled. 

"Election integrity is essential to our democracy. I have signed the strongest election laws in the nation to protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting," Gov. Abbott said in a statement. "These reforms have led to the removal of over one million ineligible people from our voter rolls in the last three years, including non-citizens, deceased voters, and people who moved to another state. The Secretary of State and county voter registrars have an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the Attorney General's Office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution. Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans' sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.

Of the 6,500 non-citizens removed from the voter rolls, 1,930 had a voting history. These individual cases were sent to Attorney General Ken Paxton's (R-TX) office for further investigation and potential charges.

With the November election less than 40 days away, ensuring that Americans have faith in the electoral process by making it as secure as possible should be a top priority for elected officials nationwide.

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