NC Board of Elections confers with staff on April 16, 2026, before a party-line vote to approve new rules for challenging registrations of potential noncitizens. (Photo: Lynn Bonner/NC Newsline)
Elections officials in North Carolina counties may soon be able to challenge “potential noncitizens” on their voter rolls, a move that detractors say will burden citizens called to government offices to show documents.
The proposed election rule is part of the Republican-run election board’s intensified effort to find people who are not U.S. citizens who may be registered to vote.
The State Board of Elections adopted the new rule with a 3-2 party-line vote, establishing a procedure for verifying the status of people on the voter rolls who may not be citizens. It’s a step the board is taking as it anticipates getting lists of names from the federal government’s SAVE database.
The North Carolina Rules Review Commission must approve the new procedures before they can be used.
SAVE is an online database maintained by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, that governments use to determine citizenship status of people seeking government benefits. The Trump administration revamped it and is encouraging states to run their voter lists through the database to find people who are not citizens.
NC elections board will pursue citizenship checks on voter rolls as feds draw up new program
The state board voted in November along party lines to partner with Homeland Security to use the database. The state could start feeding voter names to the federal government as soon as Friday.
However, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found widespread errors where SAVE mistakenly flagged Texas voters as noncitizens. And national studies have found that noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
Board member Jeff Carmon, a Democrat, equated the requirement that people produce documents to a poll tax.
“We’re saying you have to show your papers to prove you’re a citizen of this country,” Carmon said.
Board Secretary Stacy “Four” Eggers IV, a Republican, disagreed.
“Our obligation is to enforce the rules, and one of the rules is you have to be a citizen of the United States, among other criteria, in order to be an eligible voter,” Eggers said.
Board member Siobhan Millen said she wants clean voter rolls, but using the SAVE database was not the way to achieve that goal.
“It has been shown it’s not a very reliable tool,” she said.
More than 15,000 people commented on the proposed rule changes, staff lawyer Adam Steele told the board. An analysis of comments provided by Deborah Oronzio of Raleigh, a member of progressive voting-rights group Democracy Out Loud, showed a vast majority of commenters opposed the rules.
Under the proposed procedure the state elections board endorsed Thursday, when people are flagged as potential noncitizen registrants, their county’s elections administrators will be notified and will search their own records for proof of citizenship. If they can’t find any, people flagged would be called in to preliminary hearings to show documentation. If there’s a question after the preliminary hearings, the county boards will hold challenge hearings.
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SUPPORTAfter the board meeting, Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonprofit that encourages voting, worried about young people being discouraged by the new rules.
“That population really concerns me about them having to jump through all of these hoops,” she said. “They might just sit out, not thinking that they can actually still vote.”
The state has already begun looking for noncitizens using jury duty questionnaires. People who say they are noncitizens in response to jury summons are checked for voter registration.
Brian LiVecchi said most of the people contacted so far through that program have said they don’t know how they were registered and want to be removed.
“Historically, what we’ve seen is shock and surprise from people who find out they are on the voter rolls, because they didn’t know,” LiVechhi said. “And they are just as eager as we are to have themselves removed.”
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