N.C. Republicans seek a voter purge that would violate federal law

N.C. Republicans seek a voter purge that would violate federal law
Arizona voters wait through long line to cast ballots (ABC15/screen grab)

Republicans want the courts to kick 225,000 voters off the North Carolina rolls by the end of next week.

The North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee said in a lawsuit filed Monday in Wake County that the State Board of Elections failed to act when resident Carol Snow complained about violations of a federal law called the Help America Vote Act. Snow said the state had used registration forms that failed to require a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.

Republicans and far-right groups are seeking voter purges in states around the country, including the swing states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.

In an email, state Board of Elections spokesman Pat Gannon said the lawsuit asks the impossible. Federal law prohibits removing voters so close to the election, he said.

“Despite being aware of their alleged claims months ago, the plaintiffs have waited until two weeks before the start of voting to seek a court-ordered program to remove thousands of existing registered voters. Federal law itself prevents such removal programs if they take place after the 90th day before a federal election, which was August 7. So, the lawsuit is asking for a rapid-fire voter removal program that violates federal law.”

This is the second lawsuit Republicans have filed against the state Board of Elections in less than a week.

Snow has made several claims about inaccurate voter rolls this year, telling the state board that registration lists are not adequately maintained. Snow belongs to a group called NC Audit Force.

“Defendants’ failure to require necessary HAVA identification information before processing and accepting hundreds of thousands of voter registration forms allowed untold numbers of ineligible voters to register. Now, those ineligible voters could vote in the upcoming November 5, 2024 election and beyond,” the GOP lawsuit says.

If the elections board can’t purge the voters, Republicans want the court to make voters who did not provide the required documents when they registered to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots would be counted only after the elections board received and verified the necessary information.

Gannon wrote that the lawsuit dramatically overstates alleged problems with voter registrations.

“The lawsuit also misunderstands the data and vastly overstates any alleged problems with voter registrations,” he said. “If a voter does not have a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number populated in the voter registration database, that does not necessarily mean that they were allowed to register improperly.”

Voters who did not provide driver’s license or Social Security information with their registration will still be asked for photo ID when they vote, Gannon said.

Ann Webb, policy director at Common Cause NC, called the lawsuit “meritless and dangerous.”

It is not designed to fix a real problem, Webb said in a statement, but to “spread disinformation that undermines public confidence in our elections while fomenting anti-immigrant hate. If the self-serving politicians behind this suit get their way, hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians could have their voter registration unfairly thrown out in direct violation of federal law.”

In a statement issued Tuesday morning, state House Democratic Leader Robert Reives blasted the lawsuit as part of an ongoing GOP strategy to use “intimidation, chaos and even outright disenfranchisement” to limit voting rights.

“The same folks who try to rig our legislative and congressional elections with gerrymandered maps now want to rig our statewide elections by purging hundreds of thousands of voters from the voting rolls just weeks before a presidential election,” Reives said.

This story was updated at 12:30 pm Tuesday.

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The Department of Homeland Security has quietly published a new webpage designed to help carry out President Donald Trump’s unprecedented plan to create federal lists of eligible voters in all 50 states.

The newly published “State Citizenship Lists Portal” popped up Tuesday and currently displays a blue box declaring that the lists are “coming soon,” according to a report by Democracy Docket.

A DHS memo released in June said the agency planned to have the portal fully operational by Friday, Sept. 4. The portal stems from a March executive order directing DHS and the Social Security Administration to centralize information held across the federal government and use it to compile state-by-state lists of people deemed eligible to vote, the report said.

“Combined, the lists sought by Trump would amount to a nationwide voter eligibility database managed by the federal government,” according to Democracy Docket. “No such thing has ever before existed because the U.S. election system is designed to be managed by states and localities, not the executive branch.”

Voting experts have argued that federal agencies do not possess the authority to create or administer such lists. They warn the database could be used to challenge individuals’ presence on state voter rolls - and ultimately their right to cast a ballot in November’s midterm election.

Compiling massive amounts of Americans’ personal information could also violate federal privacy protections, advocates warned, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed a lawsuit calling the project "flagrantly unlawful."

“Building a database containing the identities, Social Security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach by the federal government,” said John Davisson, the research center's deputy director.

“This is precisely the nightmare ‘Big Brother’ scenario that the Privacy Act exists to prevent,” he added.

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Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin handed opponents of President Donald Trump a document that threatens to undermine his entire scheme to seize control of the midterm elections.

A complaint filed this week in federal court hinges on an internal memorandum dated June 8 that Mullin signed to enforce a Trump executive order over his unproven claim that non-citizen voters were being used for the widespread rigging of elections. Congress has not granted the executive branch the authority to carry out the order.

The lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center cites Mullin's signature as setting in motion what the plaintiffs say is a series of illegal actions.

Mullin is named as a defendant along with the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The group behind it is a national privacy organization based in Washington.

"Defendants' actions are flagrantly unlawful," the group wrote in the complaint.

"[D]efendants are running roughshod over critical safeguards of the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act … and the constitutional separation of powers," the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote.

Trump signed the order the memo carries out, Executive Order 14399, on March 31, according to the complaint. Section 2(a) of that order directs Homeland Security to build a list for every state of people it has confirmed are U.S. citizens, are old enough to vote and live in that state, the complaint says.

The lists must go to each state's chief election official at least 60 days before a federal election, the complaint says. States would then be able to use them to check their own voter rolls.

The Constitution gives states, not the president, the power to decide who is eligible to vote, and it gives states and Congress the power to set the rules for federal elections, EPIC wrote in the filing.

"Yet, in its attempt to seize control over elections, the Trump Administration has brushed aside these laws and constitutional limits by ordering the mass centralization and sharing of Americans' data for ultimate use in determining voter eligibility," the group wrote.

Under a heading labeled "Signature Level Justification," the memo says that building and sending the lists spans the whole department and requires coordination with three other agencies, so the decision had to come from the top.

"[A] DHS Secretary level signatory is required to authorize USCIS to proceed with the approach outlined in this memorandum," the memo says.

The Supreme Court stayed a lower-court injunction against the order on Aug. 24, but did so on threshold grounds without ruling on whether the program is legal, the complaint says. The court suggested that plaintiffs needed proof that the Trump administration was moving forward with its plans. They say that the Mullin memo gives them that.

"By focusing first on a federated, state-facing portal and by planning citizenship-facing transparency as a follow-on enhancement, DHS can meet the EO's near-term requirements while positioning itself for further improvements once legal and privacy work is complete," the memo signed by Mullin says.

As part of its plan, Homeland Security made a website portal available to the states first to check voter eligibility, leaving ordinary citizens with no meaningful way to address challenges to their voting access. The DHS memo said that the portal would be made available to voters " later in 2026."

Through the portal, states would sign in and download separate files from three agencies containing names, dates of birth and agency identification numbers, the memo says. For the Social Security Administration, that identifier is a Social Security number, the complaint says. The agency has called the number one of the most sensitive pieces of information it holds.

Only twenty-two days separated Mullin's signature from June 30, the date the memo set for opening the portal to states. The Privacy Act requires an agency to publish notice in the Federal Register at least 30 days before it starts using people's records in a new way, and to give the public a chance to comment, according to the complaint.

"[T]he Implementation Memo's timelines and 'phased delivery' approach are facially inconsistent with the Privacy Act's notice-and-comment requirements," the group wrote.

No such notice has been published for the citizenship lists or the portal, and the memo describes no plan to publish one, the complaint says.

The lists themselves would be built from records the agencies have already called unreliable, the complaint says.

"Defendants are creating the State Citizenship Lists by repurposing data the government admits is unreliable, outdated, and incomplete," EPIC wrote.

Anthony Nel, a Denton County, Texas, resident who became a citizen through his parents, is one of the voters who already experienced this, the complaint says. Texas officials canceled his registration after running it through the federal system.

Nel proved his citizenship and got his registration back, the complaint says, but he now checks his status regularly because the new lists would draw on the same records that flagged him.

"Disregarding these known problems, DHS has pushed states to bulk upload their entire statewide voter lists into the Modified SAVE system for mass citizenship checks," EPIC wrote. "The President is particularly fixated on baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens."

Voting by noncitizens is rare, according to the Associated Press, which also reported that a proof-of-citizenship rule in Kansas blocked roughly 30,000 eligible people from registering before a federal court overturned it.

U.S. District Judge Denise Casper permanently barred most of Trump's first election order in June, according to NBC News.

In a separate action, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked two more citizenship provisions of that order, the Associated Press reported. Trump's proof-of-citizenship bill passed the House and stalled in the Senate.

"Defendants' list-making scheme is well underway," the group wrote.

Homeland Security has secured a web domain for the portal, and a banner on the page reads "Coming Soon," according to the complaint. Mullin has said election officials who refuse to use the lists could face investigations, fines and prison time, the complaint says, citing The New York Times.

The deadline is Sept. 4, 60 days before the November election. The memo says USCIS "must" meet it, and the government told the Supreme Court in July that it would.

Far-right British influencer Milo Yiannopoulos got arrested at the New Orleans airport and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week for overstaying his visa.

Now, speaking to Piers Morgan on his "Uncensored" show in London, Yiannopoulos admitted he had no idea how demeaning and painful it was to be on that end of the immigration system, despite the years he spent calling for mass deportations.

“I don't think I've ever been frightened like that before,” Yiannopoulos told Morgan. “I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you. They put you in manacles, your hands, your feet, chained together. Everybody is arrested like an MS-13 gang member. And it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television."

“I was put from a detention facility to a correctional facility; every three hours, they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyers... no one would tell me anything," he added. "I mean, I know it's designed to be like that, but it was humiliating, and it was disorientating all the rest of it; it was physically degrading. It was frightening.”

Yiannopoulos said that the incident, which marks the first time he has ever been arrested in his life, has shaken his support for President Donald Trump to his core — particularly since fellow far-right influencer and "Trump whisperer" Laura Loomer has taken credit for putting a target on his back.

“I went to work for her campaign when she ran for Congress the first time ... it was clear after a couple of weeks, there was something very, very wrong with her," Yiannopoulos said of Loomer. “But unfortunately, she's fallen into this kind of symbiotic, sort of toxic relationship with Trump where he can't get enough of her obsequious toadying praise and she can't get enough of the clout from the proximity. And so I think he allows her to run riot because he likes anybody who praises him, especially, I guess, these days, because they're pretty few and far between.”

“To think that the promise and hope and joy and the anticipation of Trump 2016 could, sort of, over the course of ten years, collapse into this ugly, warmongering, whole mentally ill heap of crazy — with some of the most unstable and lunatic people, seemingly directing the President's actions!" he said. "If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place, and I'm very ashamed that I did.”

When confronted over his hypocrisy for only turning on ICE when he got deported, he didn't fight it. "You got me!" he said. He expressed that immigration agents should be focusing on violent criminals and drug dealers, not people who overstay visas.

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