NC State Board of Elections moves toward agreement to verify citizenship status of voters

RALEIGH, NC (WWAY) — The North Carolina State Board of Elections voted Tuesday to authorize its executive director to move forward with an agreement that would allow the state to compare voter registration records with federal citizenship data, according to the State Board.

During its meeting, the board approved allowing Executive Director Sam Hayes to enter into a memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agreement would permit the State Board to check North Carolina’s voter rolls against USCIS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.

Officials said the comparison would help verify that individuals registered to vote in the state are U.S. citizens, as required by law. Finalizing the memorandum is expected to take several weeks.

“This is one of the few tools available to us to check for noncitizens on our voter rolls,” Hayes said in the release. “We are pleased to follow the letter of the law outlined in North Carolina’s Constitution and to make clear that elections are reserved for U.S. citizens.”

The SAVE program is an online service that allows federal, state, local, territorial and tribal agencies, along with other authorized entities, to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals for benefits, licenses and other lawful purposes.

Hayes noted that Texas recently entered into a similar agreement. According to Hayes, the Texas secretary of state’s office ran more than 18 million voter records through the SAVE database and identified 2,724 potential noncitizens registered to vote.