Fact check: Are immigrants voting illegally in North Carolina?
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The issue: Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill creating new ways for the state to kick people off the voter rolls. Republican lawmakers criticized Cooper, saying the bill would have stopped non-citizens from voting. But Cooper said the state already has protections in place to prevent that, and the bill may have done more harm than good. While voter fraud isn’t entirely nonexistent in North Carolina, the facts are on Cooper’s side here.
Why we’re checking this: Voter fraud is likely to be a hot topic in the 2020 elections. Nationally, Republican President Donald Trump frequently makes false claims about voter fraud. And locally, North Carolina elections have been hit by allegations — some credible, some not— about voter fraud in the recent past.
What you need to know: The bill passed by the General Assembly would have cross-referenced voter rolls with courthouse records — lists of people who were not put on a jury because they weren’t citizens.
Cooper’s veto touched off a firestorm of debate. Conservatives said he was sacrificing the sanctity of the ballot for political correctness.
“How radical do you have to be to block a bill making it harder for foreign nationals to vote in American elections?” asked Republican Sen. Warren Daniel, one of the bill’s sponsors, after Cooper vetoed it.
Cooper said Senate Bill 250 added nothing new to the state’s ability to find and purge people who shouldn’t have been allowed to register to vote. In addition to not being helpful, he said, the bill could also cause unnecessary harm to legitimate voters.
“This legislation creates a high risk of voter harassment and intimidation and could discourage citizens from voting,” Cooper said, adding that state law “already prevents non-citizens from voting and has legitimate mechanisms to remove them from the rolls.”
Cooper is correct that it’s already illegal to vote as a non-citizen in North Carolina, and there are multiple ways in which authorities can weed out any ineligible voters, both before and after the vote happens. In fact, the North Carolina State Board of Elections claims it is “one of a few of its kind in the nation” with an entire division devoted to investigating voter fraud.
Before any votes are cast, every person who registers must swear under penalty of perjury that they’re a U.S. citizen.
After the votes are cast, the state cross-references databases and looks into tips to find potentially illegal voters, and has found small numbers in the past.
A 2018 report from the federal government noted that federal law “requires the chief election official in each state to attempt to verify the information on first-time voter registration applications” by cross-referencing it with databases maintained by agencies like the DMV and Social Security Administration.
That report found that North Carolina cross-references not just those databases, but others as well.
The report doesn’t specifically say whether any states use jury excuse records. But an expert with the Brennan Center, a public policy think tank at New York University, said only three states use those records. They are Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, according to Myrna Pérez, director of the center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program.
In an audit of the 2016 elections, North Carolina investigators caught 41 voters — out of 4.8 million — who cast a ballot despite being a citizen of another country.
All of them, the audit said, were lawful U.S. residents. And the investigation turned up nearly as many false positives as confirmed cases. In addition to the 41 non-citizen voters who were caught, investigators also looked into 34 people who turned out to actually be citizens.
The possibility for false positives was one reason Cooper and his allies opposed the voting bill. The bill would’ve made the courthouse records public, which Cooper referenced when he said the bill would create “a high risk of voter harassment and intimidation.”
Tomas Lopez, executive director of the voting rights group Democracy North Carolina, said in addition to the possibility for anti-immigrant harassment, the bill could have disenfranchised legitimate voters who were either accidentally listed as immigrants by the court system, or who had become citizens after the time they had been called into jury duty.
Federal courts also have cast a skeptical eye on attempts to crack down on alleged voter fraud that could end up disenfranchising legitimate voters in North Carolina, according to the Brennan Center.
Just like state government, the federal government can check on voters’ citizenship status too.
In 2018, a federal prosecutor in North Carolina charged 19 immigrants with illegally voting in 2016. Some of those cases have ended with minor fines, the N&O has reported, while others have yet to be decided.
The state’s post-2016 audit found that voter fraud is “neither rampant nor non-existent in North Carolina” and that “ineligible voters are not isolated to one political party or any geographical region of the state.”
Including the 41 non-citizen voters, the audit identified 508 cases of suspected voter fraud, the N&O has reported. Nearly all of them were people with felony records who hadn’t had their rights restored yet.
The 2016 elections also saw false allegations of voter fraud during and after the election. Trump has made numerous false statements about immigrants voting. North Carolina was one of the states Trump singled out in one rally, falsely claiming Barack Obama only won the state in 2008 because thousands of immigrants voted illegally for him.
Shortly after the elections, then-Gov. Pat McCrory tried to challenge his loss to Cooper by making claims about voter fraud. Part of his campaign’s strategy was to accuse several dozen North Carolina residents of voting illegally.
However, many of those allegations were ruled to be baseless, and some of the voters who were falsely accused of committing voter fraud later sued McCrory’s campaign for libeling them.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREOur process
We check claims that are widely shared or published; are about a topic of concern to many of our readers; can be proven or disproven through facts; and could cause people to act or vote in a certain way. This topic met all the criteria.
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Find out more about our process here. And as always, we abide by our newsroom’s ethical guidelines.
Our sources. Here’s where we found information and research on this topic:
North Carolina voter registration rules and FAQ
North Carolina’s 2016 “Post-Election Audit Report”
Federal government report on voter database checks, 2014
Federal government report on voter database checks, 2018
Text of the North Carolina bill Cooper vetoed, SB 250
Brennan Center report on NC voter purge lawsuit
2005 USGAO report on voter registration issues
National Conference of State Legislatures report: “Voter List Accuracy”
News & Observer article on voters’ lawsuit against McCrory
This story was produced by The News & Observer Fact-Checking Project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. It was edited by Politics Editor Jordan Schrader and Managing Editor Jane Elizabeth. Submit a suggestion for what we should check, or a comment or suggestion about our fact-checking, at bit.ly/nandofactcheck.
This story was originally published November 21, 2019 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Fact check: Are immigrants voting illegally in North Carolina?."
