The North Carolina State Board of Elections’s Republican majority voted Thursday to move forward with using a federal immigration database to check the state’s voter rolls — an escalation in the board’s ongoing effort to scrutinize voter rolls that could put eligible voters at risk.
The decision came during a public meeting where the board approved new rules to identify and potentially remove voters suspected of being noncitizens using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) SAVE database — a federal system that has been criticized for inaccuracies and incomplete records.
The measure passed on a 3–2 party-line vote, with Republicans on the board voting in favor and Democrats opposing.
“I’m totally against this rule, I vote no,” Democratic board member Jeff Carmon said.
“Mr. Chairman, we are a country of laws and not of men, and as such we need to adopt rules for the process of this, and I vote aye,” Republican board member Stacy Eggers said.
The move allows state election officials to compare North Carolina’s voter registration records against federal immigration data in an effort to identify people who may not be U.S. citizens. Under the rules, voters flagged through the system could be required to prove their eligibility to remain on the rolls.
Voting rights advocates have long warned the SAVE system was not designed for voter list maintenance and can incorrectly flag eligible U.S. citizens — particularly naturalized citizens — because federal databases are often outdated or incomplete.
The vote marks the latest step in a broader push by the board’s GOP majority to expand database-driven voter verification efforts.
In recent months, the board also:
- Sent letters to more than 241,000 voters whose identification numbers did not match government databases;
- Implemented a “Registration Repair Project” affecting roughly 200,000 voters whose records were missing required information due to flaws in the state’s own registration forms;
- Advanced efforts to obtain additional personal data, including full Social Security numbers from the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles; and
- Supported a proposed settlement with Republican groups to expand how suspected noncitizens are identified using jury duty records — a system that could route flagged voters to law enforcement and make sensitive data public.
