Special to IFN
RALEIGH — The State Board of Elections took a step toward strengthening election integrity in North Carolina during its meeting on Tuesday.
Board members voted to authorize Executive Director Sam Hayes to enter into a memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agreement will allow the State Board to compare North Carolina’s voter registration records with citizenship data in USCIS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database.
The comparison will help verify that individuals on the state’s voter rolls are U.S. citizens, as required by law. The memorandum is expected to take several weeks to finalize.
“This is one of the few tools available to us to check for noncitizens on our voter rolls,” Hayes said. “We are pleased to follow the letter of the law outlined in North Carolina’s Constitution and to make clear that elections are reserved for U.S. citizens.”
The program is an online service that allows federal, state, local, territorial and tribal agencies, as well as other authorized entities, to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals for benefits, licenses and other lawful purposes.
“The Texas secretary of state’s office recently entered into a similar agreement,” Hayes said. “After running its entire voter list — more than 18 million records — through the SAVE database, the office identified 2,724 potential noncitizens registered to vote in Texas.”
Talk about making a big deal about a problem that isn’t really a problem. According to the google, there are 18.6 million voters registered in Texas. 2,724 “potential noncitizens” equals 0.015%. So actual noncitizens will likely be an even smaller number. On brave new world. “Show us your papers!”
I thought we all had to have a federal & state verified, indesputible ID to vote now. Furthermore, Stephen Miller & Kristi Noem are deporting everyone who even looks vaguely foreign/non-citizen-like, including lots of actual U.S. Citizens. Are Phil Berger and Destin Hall revealing that NONE of the many obstacles to voting passed by the Republican dominated N.C. General Assembly (led by them) and the Fed actions of Noem & Miller are failures? I’m seriously impressed (not) with this latest law to spend valuable time & dwindling resources (due to tax cuts for the wealthy) to make absolutely certain some brown woman, who never even considered voting, won’t be able to if the thought ever once enters her mind. I am also wondering how it will prevent card-carrying U.S. Citizens who actually commit voter fraud from doing so. We’ve had plenty of high profile cases of that happening in N.C. (and nationwide). I will not mention to which political party the overwhelming majority belonged.