Officials investigate voter registration

Charlotte | State and federal officials are looking into whether North Carolina kept accurate voter registration records and election returns over the past couple of cycles, The Charlotte Observer reported Friday.

The ongoing investigations have not been made public, but they became a point of contention when State Auditor Leslie Merritt shared some of the findings with state lawmakers. The legislators are considering a bill to allow voters to register and immediately cast a ballot at one-stop sites in the last month before an election.

Merritt's office, which began reviewing voter rolls in January, shared the preliminary findings with the state board last week. It's a standard step in the audit process that allows the subject to rebut the findings and have some input into the final report.

The auditor's office deviated from the process by also sharing the preliminary findings with Senate leaders and sponsors of the one-stop voting bill, asking that they pull the bill from the Senate's June 5 floor calendar, Merritt spokesman Chris Mears said.

"The (auditor's office) took this unusual, proactive step because it believed it had uncovered information that legislators would need to make an informed public policy decision," Mears said in a statement Thursday evening.

But Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said many of the findings were invalid.

The board told The Charlotte Observer that Merritt's staff said they found 24,821 invalid driver's license numbers in the voter registration database, 380 people who appear to have voted after their dates of death and others who were younger than 18 when they voted.

In a 10-page written response to the preliminary report, written Wednesday, Bartlett accused Merritt's office of misleading the elections board and of rejecting its help.

"(Y)our office appears to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the data that was reviewed or about the federal and state laws governing the voter registration process," Bartlett wrote in the letter, which he provided to lawmakers Thursday and which was obtained by the Observer.

For example, he said, many of the "dead" voters had actually voted absentee and then died before Election Day. Also, at least some "underage" voters cast ballots legally because state law allows 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 the day of the general election.

Mears said the auditors are adjusting their report based on Bartlett's objections. "This is a typical process we do in refining our findings," he said.

Bartlett also said that 725,499 names were removed from state voter rolls during a recent 19-month period as part of a regular maintenance process. Most were inactive registrations, or individuals who had moved or died.

Two lawmakers have asked Merritt - and Bartlett - to appear at a hearing next week to explain the auditors' work.

Federal officials have also advised the elections board that they are reviewing North Carolina's voter rolls.

A letter from the Justice Department two months ago said the agency found irregularities in the number of people registered to vote.

The review was based on an analysis similar to the one used by Merritt's office. It cited no evidence of voter fraud or illegal voting.

The Charlotte Observer reported that Bartlett's response pointed to flaws in the Justice Department's analysis.

For example, he said, election officials have to wait two consecutive federal elections to remove someone who has simply been inactive, which can cause voter rolls to appear inflated in counties with a highly mobile population.