The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections, arguing that they failed to maintain an accurate voter list and violated the Help America Vote Act.
Coming off the heels of a months-long legal battle and election dispute over the North Carolina Supreme Court election where Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin challenged over 65,000 ballots, the DOJ filed a lawsuit on May 27 against the North Carolina State Board of Elections. The DOJ claims that the board of elections failed to maintain an accurate voter list and violated the Help America Vote Act. HAVA, which was signed into law in 2002, is a federal election law that established standards for election administration and the voting process.
The DOJ’s lawsuit alleges that North Carolina violated HAVA by not requiring voters to provide a driver’s license or the last four digits of their social security number — two forms of identification that were at the heart of Griffin’s dispute. The lawsuit claims that a significant number of voters were added to and remain on North Carolina’s voter registration roll without that identifying information.
Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University, said this likely stemmed from human error and not nefarious activities by election officials. He said the DOJ’s lawsuit calls for skepticism because of the department’s politicization under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“It’s literally things like people accidentally leaving something off of a form, and then being clearly valid voters for years and saying, ‘Back in 2003 you forgot to include your social security number here,’ and then saying that means you’re a fraudulent voter, which doesn’t even pass the smell test,” Greene said.
The lawsuit comes after Trump signed an executive order on March 25 aimed at ensuring elections are being held in compliance with federal laws.
Executive Director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections Sam Hayes, who was recently appointed to the position on May 7, said in a statement that the board will work to ensure all voters are properly registered.
“We are still reviewing the complaint from the United States Department of Justice, but the failure to collect the information required by HAVA for some voters has been well documented. Rest assured that I am committed to bringing North Carolina into compliance with federal law,” Hayes wrote in an email statement to Elon News Network.
The lawsuit cannot undo Democrat Allison Riggs’ victory over Griffin or any other statewide elections because they have been officially certified, but the DOJ seeks to demand a 30-day deadline for the board to contact all the voters in question and either get their identifying information or remove them from the voter registration roll.
Western Carolina University political science and public affairs professor Christopher Cooper believes the lawsuit could result in some change because the board responded positively to the lawsuit.
“The new state board has already come out to say that they tend to agree with the lawsuit, that they tend to think that they do need to do more to, in their words, secure voter rolls,” Cooper said. “So I think there’s a lot of signals that this state board of elections and this director will try to address the problems identified in the current suit.”
This debate over North Carolina elections comes after a 2024 election season that was tightly contested in statewide races and saw the continuation of a political trend that has dominated North Carolinian politics in recent elections — split-ticket voting.
Split-ticket voting occurs when a voter chooses candidates from different political parties for different races on the same ballot. North Carolina saw this occur during its gubernatorial race in the last three elections through the election of a Democratic governor and a Republican president. The 2024 election in North Carolina also witnessed split-ticket voting between the election of Donald Trump for president with 49.8% of the vote and the election of Democrat Jeff Jackson for attorney general with 51.65% of the vote.
SMART Election, a nonpartisan watchdog group, tracked this specific case of split-ticket voting and analyzed the difference in votes for the presidential race and the attorney general race in North Carolina. According to SMART Elections data, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris got fewer votes than Jackson in every county. 5.84% fewer people voted Democrat for president than attorney general in North Carolina. On the Republican side, 6.32% more people voted Republican for president than attorney general. Alamance County followed this trend, as 47,937 people voted Republican for president, while only 45,153 voted Republican for attorney general. Additionally, fewer people voted Democrat for president than attorney general in Alamance.
Cooper said that this pattern of split-ticket voting is part of North Carolina’s DNA and dates back to the early 1970s.
“North Carolina was never as Democratic as the other southern states were in the past, and today we’re not as Republican as the other southern states are,” Cooper said. “We’re this odd mix of this purple state that sits in this very red region, and what that means is we’re going to get a lot of close outcomes that tend to fall in inconsistent directions.”
According to Cooper, North Carolina had the most split-ticket outcomes of any state in the country in the 2024 election. He said this pattern can be seen in some other states like swing states, but that North Carolina’s elections are particularly close, resulting in a number of split outcomes. Vermont and New Hampshire followed North Carolina by electing a governor of a different political party than the presidential candidate that won the state. Swing states such as Michigan and Arizona saw key Democratic victories in Senate elections, despite Trump winning both states.
Greene said that competency of candidates can also play a role in this. He said that Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson was a “historically bad gubernatorial candidate,” and that played a role in why the ballot was split between a Republican president and a Democratic governor. Or vice versa, Greene said that Jackson was able to win because he was a particularly good candidate and had a presence on social media. Jackson has approximately 712,000 followers on Instagram, while Gov. Josh Stein — the highest ranked elected official in North Carolina’s executive branch — only has about 33,000.
“Jeff Jackson, with his social media presence and his skills as a politician, is somebody who was able to win the attorney general with his unusually good abilities as a political candidate,” Greene said.
Greene said that split-ticket has seen a decline countrywide and that it is hard to predict how state’s party affiliations will change over time, but believes North Carolina will continue this trend for the next few elections.
“It’s safe to say for the short term, we should expect that North Carolina will have very closely contested statewide elections, and that if we’re going to be having very closely contested statewide elections, then you should expect patterns where one party wins some and the other party wins the other,” Greene said.
