Elections chief blasts voter-purge story

Reported removal of qualified voters from rolls is untrue, he says

By: JournalNow Staff | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 10, 2008

RALEIGH

North Carolina's elections chief lashed out at a report yesterday that suggested that the state had misused a Social Security Administration database to purge voters from the state's registration rolls.

Gary Bartlett, the director of the State Board of Elections, said that it is "simply untrue" that some qualified voters in North Carolina could be disenfranchised.

A front-page story in The New York Times questioned why North Carolina and several other states had run so many checks of voter registrations through a Social Security Administration system used to validate a registrant's identity. The Social Security Administration has said that North Carolina has run about 400,000 queries.

Officials in Colorado and Michigan also questioned the validity of the Times' story. The Times stood by its story. Spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said that the paper's reporting was based on voter-registration data provided by the states themselves.

Bartlett said that North Carolina officials check the validity of both a driver's license and a Social Security number if the registrant provides both, which he believes is allowed under federal law. He said that the board plans to streamline the process after this year's election so that the state won't run a Social Security check if the driver's license alone validates the registrant's identity.

He also said that many of the state's 700,000 new registrations may have come from people with out-of-state driver's licenses, and therefore listed their Social Security number to confirm their identity. He said that others may have simply chosen to provide their Social Security number instead of their driver's license number on registration paperwork.

Bartlett added that the lack of a match in the Social Security number does not lead officials to remove voters from the rolls. He said that voters in question can confirm their identity on Election Day or, as a last resort, vote with a provisional ballot and confirm their identity later.