In bipartisan vote, NC elections board shoots down 'audit force' allegations of election violations
North Carolina elections officials voted unanimously Thursday night to dismiss a local election integrity activist's claims that the state is violating federal elections law and allowing voter fraud to go unchecked.
The board's votes on contentious matters are often split down party lines. So their unanimous agreement that the claims were meritless was notable — particularly in a presidential election year, when claims of fraud are likely to become more commonplace as the November elections approach.
Carol Snow, who's affiliated with the NC Audit Force group whose stated mission "is to pursue truth, restore integrity, and abolish tyranny," filed a complaint that the state was violating the Help America Vote Act. HAVA is a key piece of federal election law.
In particular, she said, the state has been failing to properly update lists of voters and where they live and cast ballots. She said her personal research had shown there are "duplicate voters" who were able to cast multiple ballots in recent elections.
Professional staff for the state elections board, including top agency lawyer Paul Cox, looked into her claims and responded under oath at Thursday's meeting. The allegations were false, they said, apparently due to mistakes or to Snow lacking access to certain data the state has but the public doesn't — such as voters' Social Security numbers — to keep tabs on voters with similar names.
Some of Snow's accusations of double-voting, they said for example, were in reality just instances of fathers and sons with the same name each casting a ballot.
Earlier in the day Thursday, by coincidence, the state Supreme Court heard a case dealing with whether campaign operatives who make similar mistakes and falsely accuse people of voter fraud can be sued for defamation.
Grassroots election integrity efforts like Snow's have grown in popularity among conservatives ever since former Republican President made voter fraud allegations a key part of his complaints over losing the 2020 election to Democratic President Joe Biden.
Although neither Trump nor his supporters have been able to provide proof in court to back up those claims, public polling shows many Republican voters in North Carolina and nationwide still lack trust in elections.
But on Thursday there was unanimous, bipartisan agreement on the State Board of Elections — which has three Democrats and two Republicans — that Snow's claims were baseless.
"I don't believe the evidence before us shows we are in violation of federal law," Republican board member Stacey Eggers said.
"We're not seeing any cases of actual abuse," board Chairman Alan Hirsch, a Democrat, said after the vote. "Our system for ensuring voter integrity has worked extraordinarily well."
Elections officials see room for improvement
The board's Republican members, Eggers and Kevin Lewis, added that they thought Snow's complaint had helpfully illustrated that some voter lists the state keeps could be improved. The board's Democratic members tended to agree with that assessment as well.
Hirsch ended the meeting by ordering the state's elections staffers to write up a report on how they could better clean up the data, particularly for the voters who don't have a driver's license number or Social Security number on file with the state. Such information isn't required to register to vote. But most people have one or both, and Hirsch and Eggers each spoke of possibly asking voters to give poll workers that information when they go vote, if it's not already on file.
Democratic member Jeff Carmon added his concern that the agency doesn't have much bandwidth to undertake new, labor-intensive tasks since its staff is already stretched thin due to what he described as low funding levels from the state legislature.
And Democratic member Siobhan Millen said many of Snow's complaints could be better addressed — and might have been avoided altogether — if North Carolina were a member of ERIC, a nationwide group of states whose elections officials share data to make sure people aren't voting in multiple states. State Republican lawmakers wrote a new law into the 2023 state budget specifically banning North Carolina from joining ERIC, which has been the subject of conspiracy theories in some conservative circles.
Snow told board members Thursday her complaint wasn't political in nature. The investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica reported in 2022 that Snow was involved with local GOP-led efforts in Surry County, in northwest North Carolina, to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud. A state elections official confirmed the person named in that article was the same person who filed the complaint that the elections board dismissed Thursday.
That same year, WRAL reported, Surry County commissioners invited MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has created a national following for his election denialism, to give a speech on election integrity. Several months later both Republican members of the Surry County board of elections refused to certify the results of the local elections.
The State Board of Elections later found they had no legitimate reason to do that, and the state board's Democratic and Republican members voted unanimously in 2023 to remove both those Surry County officials from office for violating their duties.
