North Carolina’s voting system is supposed to catch when voters cast two ballots, but multiple citizens have cast at least two “valid” ballots that have been “accepted” in two different counties.
While President-Elect Donald Trump mounted a decisive victory in the state, the Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) shows numerous individuals having voted twice in this year’s election.
Using the NCSBE voter search tool, The Federalist independently verified 33 voters who cast two ballots, sometimes in a different county, sometimes in the same county. A data analyst speaking with The Federalist says that number may just scratch the surface of the problem, given how poorly the NCSBE maintains its voter rolls.
“The NCEIT team and our network of affiliated analysts are closely monitoring the North Carolina ‘Voted’ list for a wide range of anomalies. Double voting is just one of the malfeasances we track,” Jim Womack, president of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT), told The Federalist. “We stand ready to challenge all instances of double voting to help ensure election integrity. Where appropriate, we will turn over evidence of fraudulent voting to law enforcement authorities for prosecution.”
In one example, a voter appears to have tried to cast three ballots: two in-person ballots in Gaston County and Lincoln County through early voting and another by mail in Gaston County. While the final mail-in ballot was ultimately rejected, the early votes in the two different counties show up on the NCSBE website with a “valid return” ballot status that have been “accepted.”
Speaking on the phone with The Federalist, Gaston County Elections Director Adam Ragan explained that, despite the voter having the same state identification number (NCID), counties are unable to see if a person has already voted in another county.
That, Ragan said, is supposed to be caught during the post-election canvass period, when states report their votes to the NCSBE, which holds the statewide voter database that theoretically will flag what are called “conflict” votes from the same voter in different areas.
“It’s a voter history audit that we do. After elections, we enter in all the voter history from all the counties, and then it goes to a centralized database at the state board of elections, and then it produces any discrepancies, any ‘conflicts,’ as we call them,” Ragan said. “So, Lincoln and Gaston would see that conflict and whichever county had this second vote, they would be able to reject that ballot.”
That is how it is supposed to work, but the data analyst speaking with The Federalist, who has 35 years of experience and requested to remain anonymous in order to maintain her audits of elections data, said that she has tracked this issue for several years.
Even if the post-election audit worked to flag double-voting in two different counties, the question that remains unanswered is how many of the voters reviewed by The Federalist were able to cast two ballots in the same county.
“The state board is not doing the job that they need to do, and that is having data integrity,” the analyst said. “There is no data integrity there, and every time that they’re queried about it, they say it’s ‘safe and secure,’ and it’s garbage. It’s absolutely garbage. It’s the worst system I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve been working as a data analyst for about 35 years. This is an extraordinarily bad — I mean, it wouldn’t pass any kind of master, any kind of audit, anywhere.”
The analyst said the fix would be extremely easy to track these double votes, but that the NCSBE inexplicably refuses to do so. The NCSBE did not respond to a request for comment from The Federalist.
Many of the voter profiles of those who cast two ballots reviewed by The Federalist are bizarre. Some show that a voter might have cast a ballot in mid-October, but that the individual registered to vote in early November, likely through a same-day registration process at an in-person early voting site.
“When they do that same-day registration, they don’t check,” Ragan said. “There’s no duplicate check at the polling place for a duplicate registration.”
Those are at least the people for whom the state has maintained the same NCID, as they are supposed to do in order to track registrations. Others, however, appear to have been given two NCIDs, creating two active voter profiles, despite having the same name, address, age, and other identifying characteristics.
In text messages reviewed by The Federalist, an 18-year-old college student voted in Durham County by mail, but then moved to Pitt County to attend East Carolina University and registered on campus, voting in person. Both show as “valid” and “accepted” ballots in the NCSBE search tool.
Motivation or knowledge who are shown having voted twice is difficult to verify, but in this instance, the student believed the system would have worked, and he therefore assumed Durham would have invalidated his first ballot.
“Since I was now registered in pitt county, I called my parent, asking them what I should do,” the student wrote in a text. “They told me that the durham board of elections will just discard my ballot when they see that I’m registered in pitt county, so i should go to the nearest early voting place and vote.”
The data analyst said the issue is partly due to North Carolina refusing to track the identities of voters, adding, “We cannot be sure that our voter rolls are accurate or being maintained. There appears to be no effort to verify or ascertain citizenship of anyone on our voter rolls given that these registrations have no identification.”
Despite lawsuits having been filed to fix some of the issues with citizenship, where at least 225,000 voters are registered without providing either a driver’s license or the last four digits of a Social Security Number, as required by federal law, the NCSBE has thus far refused to ascertain that information.
For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.