RALEIGH — The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) released a report citing nearly 8,000 deceased registrants and tens of thousands of duplicate interstate voter registrations in North Carolina.

the PILF report lists 7,933 deceased North Carolina registrants as still registered to vote in 2020 and states that as of spring 2020, “approximately 12,940 deceased registrants were found (ranking the state 8th in the nation)”.

“North Carolina officials should use the time they still have to prepare voter rolls for the midterm elections,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. ” Hurry up. Stupid and obvious mistakes in the voters list can create opportunities for voter fraud and chaos in a close election. Fixing deceased and duplicate records now will help address these risks preemptively.

In a statement, the PILF gave examples of deceased voters still registered long after their death. One example given was Hoyle Helms, “a World War II veteran who died in 1997 when Clinton was president. After his death, he remained on the voter rolls for almost 25 years. Another was a woman who died in 2003 but who has remained registered to vote nearly two decades later.

According to the report, 42,984 registered voters in North Carolina left the state and established or renewed their out-of-state voter registration before the 2020 election and 13,525 North Carolinas successfully registered twice in Carolina. du Nord under variations of their names.

Additionally, the report states that with 2,860 ballots mailed in, they were not delivered and there were “nearly 86,000 uncounted ballots requested by voters.” PILF says that in the 2020 election, some 15 million mail-in ballots were uncounted nationwide and an additional 1.1 million were returned as undeliverable by the USPS.

“In other words, local authorities do not know what happened to the ballots,” the PILF report said. “In the context of the 2020 presidential election, for nearly every ballot President Donald Trump has won over then-nominee Joe Biden, another has gone to an old address or is missing.”

North Carolina State Board of Elections Communications Director Patrick Gannon responded in an email to a request for comment, saying that “the North Carolina State and County Boards of Elections North remove ineligible voters from the voter registration database as required by federal, state and state law. Policy for updating the council’s list of electors.

Gannon included a copy policy in his response, as well as some substantive comments.

“PILF’s report is spared the details of its methodology, which is important because small details of how to identify potential matches across various databases can lead to large overcounting errors,” Gannon wrote.

Gannon gave an example that state election officials use an “officially approved postal service provider for national address change information, use careful matching criteria to avoid erroneous over-inclusion, and execute the mandated process by the federal government to remove voters who have moved, per 52 USC § 20507(c).

Gannon suggested that PILF’s report “may be drawn from an unofficial database, it may engage in loose matching methodology that sweeps away eligible voters, and it may disregard the requirements of the law. when identifying people who should be deported for moving”.

“Without more information, it is impossible to verify the information the organization puts forth,” Gannon wrote. “The report also acknowledges that databases that could be used to identify registrants who are no longer eligible often lack personal identifiers that would allow an election agency to confidently identify a match and remove a voter who is no longer eligible. is no longer eligible.”

“With respect to information about who may have moved, it is important to recognize that federal law places strict limits on election officials,” Gannon wrote. “Under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), in the absence of written confirmation from a voter that they have moved, an election agency cannot remove a voter from the rolls for having moved before two federal elections had passed without contact from that voter. , following an attempt by email confirmation.

Lauren Bowman, spokesperson for PILF, released a statement to the North State Journal about it.

“The fact that the state cannot confirm these deceased registrants is at the root of the problem. We have confirmed with the Social Security Death Index that all of those 7,933 people have died,” Bowman said in an email to the North State Journal. “This malfeasance by the North Carolina State Board of Elections is unacceptable.”

Bowman continued, “Instead of attacking our organization and people who support election integrity, they should contact us to get the names of these deceased registered voters. Also, we never claimed that all of these deceased registrants voted, but inevitably some still do.