Same-Day Chaos:
Nearly 5,000 NC Voters Still Not Verified Eleven Months Later
October 23, 2013
(Raleigh, NC)-OCT 23, 2013- The Voter
Integrity Project-NC, released a report today suggesting that as many as 4,857
North Carolina voters in the November 2012 election may have abused the
Same-Day Registration law in order to vote illegally and 2,253 of them were in
Mecklenburg County.
“These voters all registered and
voted during the last 19 days before the election,” said Jay DeLancy, Executive
Director of the Voter Integrity Project, “but election offices were never able
to verify the addresses of a significant number. This suggests that they were
never residents of the state, but their votes still counted.”
Until January 2014, NC law (§
163-82.7) requires a “tentative determination” of the voter’s identity within
48 hours, but the follow-on verification is performed by mail and takes longer
to complete.
“Anybody registering and voting
illegally toward the end of the Early Voting period has a pretty good chance of
safely stealing a vote,” said DeLancy. “It all depends on how quickly the
county board can do the mailings.”
Under current North Carolina law, if
the USPS returns as “undeliverable” the verification notice sent by
nonforwardable mail, the county board is required to deny the application.
VIP-NC has trouble with that process, which was mandated under the 1993
National Voter Registration Act.
“Our entire electoral system hinges
on all postal carriers being 100 per cent accurate by not delivering any verification letters
incorrectly,” he said, “and who among us ever received a misdirected piece of
mail?”
To determine the significance of the
problem, VIP-NC obtained a public record showing the complete voter history of
all NC voters and then screened out all except for the voters who registered at
the polls during last November’s one-stop voting period.
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