Feds prod NCDMV for voter registration change
The North Carolina DMV came under scrutiny for allowing noncitizens to register to vote.
File photo
North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles has strengthened the process by which it allows people with a driver’s license to register to vote in an effort to prevent noncitizens from illegally participating in elections.
The changes were instigated following scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, which prompted an internal investigation by the DMV. The initial inquiry that led to the change was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security.
Over the last several years, there has been a concern — especially among Republicans — that in some states, DMVs may be encouraging non-citizens to register to vote.
Over 1,700 noncitizens in Oregon were found to have registered to vote despite not showing proof of citizenship. In that case, over two dozen people actually voted illegally, but that isn’t the case in North Carolina, the DMV investigation determined. The Oregon investigation was instigated at the state level when a think tank called the Institute for Responsive Government filed a formal inquiry.
In North Carolina, the state board of elections launched a program to gather missing data for 103,000 registered voters in July.
In October, NCSBE Director Sam Hayes requested the NCDMV provide full social security numbers for registered voters who are DMV customers in an effort to clean up the voter rolls. At that time, DOJ alleged that the state was in violation of federal law because the voter registration form didn’t require a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a person’s social security number.
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“The Registration Repair Project aims to ensure that North Carolina’s voter rolls are as accurate and complete as possible, bring them into compliance with recent state court rulings and settle a pending lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice,” the board said in a news release.
On July 10, Russ Ferguson, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina who was appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi in March, sent a letter to NCDMV Commissioner Paul Tine. Time is a former state representative appointed in May by Gov. Josh Stein who in 2015 changed from being a Democrat to unaffiliated. The letter mirrors language often used by President Donald Trump, saying that honest elections “unmarred by errors or suspicion” require clean voter rolls.
Ferguson notes that DHS passed along the results of its investigation, saying there was a problem, a “common theme” of the NCDMV automatically registering “aliens” to vote. In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections verifies all voter registrations before approval, but the DMV can initiate that process and provide eligible citizens with registration materials.
According to the letter, an NCDMV employee said during an interview that he thought the problem was a “glitch” in the software. However, the investigation also determined during that interview that the system isn’t entirely automated since human workers fill out the initial form that indicates whether someone may be eligible to vote or not.
“Those examiners could avoid these illegal registrations,” the letter reads. “What is more, it means DMV examiners are proactively registering ineligible voters and having them sign an electronic block, impermissibly adding them to the voter rolls.”
“Such actions undermine the integrity of our elections,” it continues.
The letter ultimately presented a series of questions, which aimed to determine exactly how the process to determine whether someone is eligible to vote works. Ferguson requested a response by July 18.
Tine wrote back on Aug. 28, saying his department had conducted a “thorough investigation” that didn’t reveal systemic issues but did find two instances where errors occurred due to “examiner oversight.” He noted that the NCDMV implemented a new process whereby the Board of Elections liaison is immediately informed when errors are identified to ensure that the noncitizen doesn’t slip the through the cracks and wind up with an official voter registration.
The letter offered brief explanations of five instances ranging from November 2018 to May 2024 when noncitizens were marked down as eligible for voter registration. In some cases, errors were corrected the same day, and in one case, a voter registration application was filled out and processed.
“Since the online system doesn’t verify citizenship status, the registration went through,” the explanation notes. In some other cases, the person or a family member went back to the DMV to let employees know they shouldn’t have been marked as eligible to vote.
Ferguson wrote back again on Sept. 25 and copied the other two U.S. attorneys whose jurisdiction is in North Carolina. The letter says that although Tine claimed two issues were due to “examiner oversight,” all five issues could have been resolved by “examiner attention.”
“Your proposed solution is to alert the State Board of Elections after the fact when, by happenstance, someone outside the DMV identifies a problem,” Ferguson said in the letter.
The letter posed follow-up questions for each of the five cases identified during the NCDMV investigation. For some cases, it was asked whether discipline was meted out for employees who erred, and in some cases, Ferguson wanted to know whether the state board of elections was alerted to cancel processed voter registration applications.
Tine’s letter had mentioned that there was a system error from Nov. 19, 2018, to Feb. 13, 2019, that caused the DMV to issue one person an ID containing “false citizenship information.” Ferguson drilled down on that concern.
“Was every noncitizen who utilized the DMV system during that three-month period permitted to register to vote?” Ferguson asked. “Were others, such as minors and felons, also permitted to register to vote during that period? If so, what action has the DMV taken to proactively audit those who registered during that three- month period and remedy these problems?”
The letter also identifies one more case where a noncitizen was registered to vote that was quickly discovered, bringing the total number to six. In that case, a woman brought her husband to the DMV with her to help translate. He advised the DMV employee that his wife is not a citizen and shouldn’t be permitted to register or vote.
“[The woman] has said she marked and signed only where a DMV employee directed,” the letter reads. “Despite her efforts to the contrary, the DMV employee still registered [her] to vote. When she noticed this error, she removed her name from the voter rolls herself. Can you please investigate why she was registered to vote, who did that, and why the DMV did not notify the State Board of Elections to remove her from the voter rolls?”
Ferguson claims that the DMV’s “shortcomings” are especially concerning since the department had recently launched a pilot program that allows people to receive DMV services, including voter registration, at automated kiosks. Ferguson asked what has been done to ensure only “eligible individuals” can register to vote when they use a kiosk, some of which aren’t located at DMV facilities.
This time, Ferguson requested a reply by Oct. 17, and Tine wrote back on Oct. 28. In this letter, the final in the string of correspondences, Tine makes one crucial point clear: the DMV doesn’t actual register people to vote, contrary to language in Ferguson’s letters that seems to claim otherwise.
“The DMV cannot and does not register voters. Federal and state law require the DMV to help facilitate voter-registration applications, but North Carolina’s county boards of elections are the only entities that can actually register an individual to vote,” Tine’s letter reads.
Tine claims that protocols are designed with that in mind, including a function in place since June 2016 that produces an error message if an examiner attempts to proceed with a voter registration application for someone who is listed as a noncitizen in DMV records. In addition, when completing the voter-registration application, the first thing a person is asked is whether they’re a citizen, and then at the end they are asked to review the details on their form, including citizenship status. Finally, the person is asked to attest, under penalty of perjury, that the information is true.
“The likelihood of an ineligible voter being able to submit a voter registration application through this process is very low — only if the non-citizen lies about their citizenship status or if an examiner misidentifies the customer as a citizen,” Tine wrote.
Tine said that the fact that the investigation only turned over a small number of individuals who’d “erroneously” registered to vote proves that the protocols in place are effective and there isn’t evidence of a widespread problem.
“While the ideal number of erroneous voter registrations would, of course, be zero, six out of millions of applications the DMV has processed in an exceedingly low error rate,” Tine wrote. “Moreover, it is my understanding that none of these voters has ever actually voted in an election in North Carolina.”
That said, the DMV did take some corrective actions, including circulating a bulletin reminding examiners of the need to retract applications if they mistakenly initiate a registration for a noncitizen, as well as training to reiterate that point.
The department has also hired more examiners statewide and is “committed to hiring dozens more,” Tine said, to ease the burden on employees. This was made easier in August when the state legislature passed HB 125, a mini-budget that authorized 64 new DMV license examiners. On Dec. 17, a month and a half after Tine’s last letter, the department celebrated 149 new examiners who’d finished their training over the last six months or so, many of whom were already on the job, according to DMV Communications Director Marty Holman.
Over the last six months, the NCDMV has brought on 149 new examiners. Donated photo
“These graduates will bring significant value to DMV offices across the state of North Carolina,” Tine said at that time. “Every new examiner means shorter lines, quicker service, and a better experience for customers. We still have work to do, but I’m proud of the progress we’re making to improve every part of the DMV.”
In his letter, Tine said other changes are in the works, too.
“We are in the midst of a major modernization effort to streamline the technological processes that examiners use, including the voter-registration component, in the hopes that smoother technological processes will reduce examiner errors,” Tine wrote, adding that the department is also pursuing a solution that would allow it to integrate citizenship checks into the online and kiosk voter-registration application systems.
A press release sent out by the U.S. Attorney’s office on Dec. 2 described the solutions Tine had laid out in his last letter.
“It is vitally important that our elections in North Carolina are accurate, fair and irreproachable — and that the public has confidence in them — to protect the foundation of our democracy,” Ferguson said in that release. “We must ensure that our voter rolls are precise and do not include minors, felons or illegal aliens. The DMV, which accounts for as much as 80 percent of voter registrations in a given year, plays a central role in that process. We appreciate the agency’s cooperation to improve processes so that only eligible voters are added to the rolls.
In an interview with The Smoky Mountain News, the U.S. Attorney said that the dust-up with the DMV came out of the nationwide initiative to “shore up voting rolls and make sure only eligible people were voting.” Ferguson said they conducted interviews with the individuals who were improperly registered to vote, all of whom are in the country legally, and that they weren’t even aware they’d been registered and that there was “obviously no criminal intent” on their part, adding that he also doesn’t think there was anything nefarious on the part of any examiners either. However, he was still concerned that people were “slipping through the cracks.”
Ferguson thinks Tine and his DMV were “super cooperative” and said he appreciated the department’s willingness to do its own investigation following his request. All the same, he considered that there were consistent mistakes being made that were indicative of “systemic problems.”
“Making sure those cracks are calked up is important, and there was no real effort to do that,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson considers that there were two key problems: first, there were no “red flags” that popped up when someone who should have been ineligible to vote began the process at the DMV; second, the examiners, who he acknowledged were dealing with a heavy workload and are doing the best they can, could be error-prone.
“And then there was a disconnect between the DMV and the state board of elections, where there were some cases where the DMV figured out that person should not have been registered to vote and fixed the error on their end … but the DMV never communicated to the state board of elections that that person should be removed from the voter rolls,” Ferguson said.
Holman, the NCDMV communications director, said that it’s important to remember that the DMV can issue and accept voter registration applications but that the final stamp of approval happens at the board of elections.
“We take our role in the voter registration process seriously and want to help the board of elections meet their mission,” Holman told SMN. “We want to make clear what our role is and we want to do that job as best we can and help the board of elections do their job.”
Ferguson ultimately considers that the investigation of the DMV that led to the new changes was worthwhile since “our democracy rests on people feeling confident in their elections.”
“Any size of problem is too big,” he said. “One erroneous vote is too many because we’ve just got to have an airtight election system, so I think it speaks to a larger problem, and I’m very glad that we got some solutions from the DMV to make sure that that everyone feels like their vote really matters and the elections are fair, accurate and safe.”
The state board of elections did not respond to emails requesting comment or information regarding voter registration procedures.
