On June 5, less than thirty minutes before the North Carolina State Senate was scheduled to vote on a bill that would allow voters to register up until three days before an election (down from 25), the Republican state auditor sent out an email to legislators saying that he had “sensitive information” about voting irregularities. Lawmakers agreed to delay the vote.
So what was all the fuss about? His office’s preliminary report had discovered tens of thousands of potentially invalid voters and nearly 400 votes by dead people, he announced. Clearly the scourge of voter fraud had hit North Carolina — more registered voters could only logically mean more chances for fraud.
The Department of Justice also got into the act, writing (pdf) the board of elections about the state’s voter list maintenance on April 18th. The letter seemed a precursor to other actions taken by the Civil Rights Division to force state’s to purge voter rolls of illegitimate voters — most notably in Missouri, where the Division lost its lawsuit.
But the director of the state election’s board, Gary Bartlett, a Democrat, hit back, detailing in a 10-page letter how little the auditor, Less Merritt, appeared to understand election laws or process (e.g. those dead voters had voted by absentee ballot and then died before election day). Bartlett was similarly blunt in his response (pdf) to the Justice Department.
The auditor so far doesn’t have an answer to Bartlett’s response.
From today’s Charlotte Observer:
State Auditor Les Merritt backed away Tuesday from the early findings of a review of North Carolina’s voter rolls, telling lawmakers his office might find no irregularities at all.“We’ll eventually get to a correct, final report,” Merritt said, “and that final report, it could very well say there isn’t anything here, that everything’s fine, we’re doing a super job.
“I think we are really doing a diligent job,” he added, “but we’ve still got some questions.”
So much for widespread fraud. The state senate is scheduled to vote on that registration bill today.
But suspicions remain about why the efforts of the Justice Department and state auditor seemed to ramp up simultaneously — and as the state legislature was considering a bill to expand voter registration.
For more on this, see the Institute for Southern Studies’ blog, Facing South.