www.VoterIntegrityProject.com
For Immediate Release (June 25, 2012)
Voter Integrity Project Names North Carolina’s Top Ten List of Fraud-Friendly Counties
(Raleigh, NC)--Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina released the results, today, of their ground-breaking research to pinpoint the top ten NC counties at greatest risk for potential voter fraud via identity theft .
“One of the easiest ways to commit election fraud is to borrow the identity of a person long enough to vote in that person’s place,” said Jay DeLancy, a voting-rights activist. “If the victim is deceased, the entire process is virtually risk-free.”
Realizing this loophole in the North Carolina election laws, DeLancy’s group, Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC), conducted database research to identify the counties with the highest likelihood of deceased residents still on their voter rolls.
“We did this by matching Census data on ‘voter-age population’ against the number of registered voters living in each county,” he said. “Some counties have so many people registered that it warrants further investigation.”
Exactly what kind of investigation VIP-NC will conduct is not yet clear since much of the identifying information they need is being withheld from public scrutiny because of strict confidentiality laws in North Carolina.
“We started with public information and attempted to match the names, last known address and predicted age against North Carolina’s record of deceased residents,” he said, “but we can only go so far without things like date of birth or NCDL number, which are considered state secrets in North Carolina.”
VIP-NC suggests that the SBOE could pro-actively perform this process with more accuracy because they have access to the critical identifying information, but DeLancy is concerned that the SBOE does not have the will to do so.
“Ensuring election integrity doesn’t appear to be very important to that organization’s leadership,” DeLancy said.
“Their Executive Director, Gary Bartlett, is appointed and not elected and this makes him more accountable to the Governor than to the voters.”
According to VIP-NC’s website (www.VoterIntegrityProject.com), the group says that a photo-ID law would mitigate many of the potential risks of voter-identity fraud, but a bill requiring such a measure was defeated by Democrats when the Legislature attempted to override Governor Perdue’s veto. The NC GOP leadership says they need just four Democrats to override the veto.
VIP-NC calls itself “non-partisan” and says that “protecting the ballot box should be less of a partisan issue and more of a constitutional one,” but their leader refuses to ignore the partisan sides taken in North Carolina’s recent battle over requiring citizens to prove their identity before being allowed to vote.
“The single party that has had total control of North Carolina’s entire electoral system for more than 100 years has stood thick as thieves to block real voter ID,” DeLancy said, “but with every vote fraud news story we see nationwide, it gets harder and harder to believe their assurances that North Carolina is somehow immune from vote fraud.”
Wake County Board of Elections will hold a hearing Tuesday, June 26, at 2:00 P.M. in response to VIP-NC’s official challenge of 553 registered voters, who they allege, are not US citizens. VIP-NC filed the challenges after discovering the names of people who were summoned for jury duty but were eventually self-disqualified by claiming they were not US citizens.
Here is VIP-NC’s list:
North Carolina’s Top Ten Vote-Fraud-Friendly Counties:
“Voter Registration Density” or percent of voting age population registered to vote.
