Proposal to find noncitizens on NC voter rolls draws criticism at heated hearing
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Proposed rules would use DHS SAVE matches to flag presumptive noncitizens on rolls.
- Counties would challenge flagged voters and require formal hearings to prove citizenship.
- Advocates warn SAVE is unreliable and changes risk disenfranchising eligible voters.
As North Carolina election officials consider partnering with the Trump administration to remove alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls, attendees at a public hearing on Monday railed against the proposal, saying it was likely to disenfranchise eligible voters.
“If these proposals are approved, the ability of thousands of citizens to vote will be placed at risk to find a handful of noncitizens,” Marsha Davenport, a Chapel Hill resident, said.
Numerous studies have found that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. In an audit of North Carolina’s 2016 general election, officials found only 41 cases of noncitizens casting a ballot out of over 4.7 million total votes cast.
Monday’s hearing revolved around new proposed rules that would allow the State Board of Elections to identify “presumptive noncitizens” based on reviews of government databases, like the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE system, housed within the Department of Homeland Security. The board is currently negotiating a deal with DHS to feed potentially millions of voters at a time into the SAVE system in search of noncitizens.
Several speakers at Monday’s hearing noted that SAVE was not designed for this purpose and has historically only been used to confirm eligibility for government benefits.
In the 2016 audit, the State Board of Elections — under a director put in charge while a Republican governor led the state — concluded that a match with the SAVE database was “not a reliable indicator that a person is not a U.S. citizen.”
The audit detailed several problems with the database, including infrequent updates and issues with naturalized citizens or those who derived citizenship from adoption incorrectly showing up as noncitizens.
“The state board should assume that if it uses the SAVE database to flag any issues, that it will be flagging eligible citizens in that process,” Hilary Klein, a lawyer for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said. “That has to be the assumption.”
How the review would work
If the rules were to be approved, the state would flag “presumptive noncitizens” for county election boards, which would be required to review local records to see if those voters ever provided documentation of citizenship.
If not, the county board would challenge the voter’s eligibility and hold a formal hearing in which the voter would be invited to provide proof of citizenship.
Irene Grimes, a Democratic member of the Cumberland County Board of Elections, said at Monday’s hearing that this setup treated voters as guilty until proven innocent.
“Instead of presuming that voters are eligible, these rules risk treating them as suspect first and forcing them to prove their innocence later, often at significant personal cost in time, money and stress,” she said.
Throughout the one-hour hearing, only one attendee spoke in favor of the proposed rules.
Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity, part of the conservative John Locke Foundation, said the rules would “help remove noncitizens from voter rolls — many of whom are on the rolls through administrative errors, rather than any wrongdoing on their own — while providing procedural protections for citizens.”
He did say, however, that the rules should give affected voters at least 10 days notice before a hearing on their eligibility — rather than the five-day period currently laid out in the draft rules.
At the end of the hearing, Brian LiVecchi, the chief of staff for the State Board of Elections, told attendees that the board would take their concerns into consideration.
“I think taking a look at those timelines is certainly warranted, maybe we do need to extend that,” he said. “... This is a process that we’re taking seriously and people’s comments are going to be considered, and they are going to be taken into account.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2026 at 4:09 PM with the headline "Proposal to find noncitizens on NC voter rolls draws criticism at heated hearing."
