Tens of thousands of North Carolina voters are expected to receive letters from the state elections board in the coming weeks asking them to prove they are who they say they are.

People who don’t respond will have to vote using a provisional ballot and present an acceptable form of identification when voting.

Other WRAL Top Stories

"This project will not result in the removal of any eligible voter from the voter rolls," said Sam Hayes, the state's top elections offical.

State elections officials on Thursday outlined what people will need to do if they are on the list of affected voters. To start with, people can go online to the Board of Elections website to find out if they're on the list of voters who will need to prove their identity. People who are on the list can fix the issues online, in person or by mail.

Full details are on that elections website, but in general the easiest ways to fix the issues will be by going online to NCDMV.gov, or by traveling to the local county-level elections office. A full list of all 100 county offices, with their addresses and contact information, can be found on the elections board website.

Anyone who doesn't fix the issues in the coming weeks should get a letter from the state in August, laying out the information and instructing them how to proceed.

"We have gone to great lengths to make this process as straightforward and transparent as possible for the affected voters," Hayes said. "We fully expect the number of voters on the list will decrease quickly.”

The moves are being undertaken by the North Carolina State Board of Elections in its effort to resolve a lawsuit filed against the state by the administration of Republican President Donald Trump.

That lawsuit’s claims are based on the same arguments state Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin — a Republican who lost the 2024 race for a seat on the state Supreme Court — used in his legal effort to overturn the election results.

Missing information

An internal database used by state elections officials is missing identifying information for the voters in question. That fact is the basis of Trump’s lawsuit, Griffin’s election challenge and other GOP-backed efforts.

Federal law requires people to provide their Social Security number or driver’s license number when they register to vote. Many of the people with missing information provided it, but government workers entered it incorrectly. Others registered to vote before the federal law requiring that information went into effect in the early 2000s.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which brought the lawsuit, doesn’t allege that any fraud has actually occurred in North Carolina elections because of the missing information. But it says the potential for fraud exists. State elections officials previously said that’s not true because there are other safeguards in place — like voter ID laws — to verify voters’ identities.

Even before the lawsuit, Republicans had repeatedly pressed the same claims — as part of prior efforts to get people stopped from voting, or to invalidate their ballots after an election.

Those previous efforts were thrown out in court, following opposition from what used to be a Democratic majority on the elections board. But the board recently switched to GOP control.

Hayes, the state’s new elections director, said last month that he had run the plan past the Trump administration and received a tentative agreement that they'd likely drop their lawsuit if North Carolina does carry out the plan.

“The goal here is to obtain that information as efficiently as possible and satisfy the outstanding litigation here," he said.

Strategy echoes Griffin lawsuit

The same claims about voters’ information missing from the database was the basis of Griffin’s unsuccessful attempt to overturn the results of his 2024 race. But he wasn’t the first to test them in court.

The North Carolina Republican Party tried making the same claims in the leadup to the 2024 election, in order to block people from being allowed to cast a ballot in any race. That lawsuit was thrown out in court by a Trump-appointed judge, who ruled that the Republican Party’s attempt to remove nearly a quarter-million people from the state’s voter rolls in the middle of an election would move North Carolina “away from a democratic form of government.”

In both those cases, the State Board of Elections leaders fought against the claims that they couldn’t verify voters’ identities. North Carolina’s voter-identification law, they pointed out, requires people to show photo identification to vote — and, if they lack photo ID, to provide an acceptable excuse and their Social Security number.

However, the elections board was led by Democrats then. It recently switched over to Republican control, after which the Trump administration sued the state. The new GOP majority on the board reversed course and pledged to do what the administration requested.

When the board voted last month to go forward with this new plan, the vote was unanimous — but not without complaints from its Democratic members.

Jeff Carmon, one of the election board’s Democratic members, said he didn't think it would be fair to force people who have been voting for years to now jump through additional hoops just to be allowed to keep voting. But, citing the threat of the Trump lawsuit, he agreed to the plan.

Legal maneuvering

In late 2024 the state’s Republican-led legislature approved an array of new laws all aimed at taking power away from Democratic officials who had just won office in the 2024 elections, including shifting control of the elections board from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein to Republican Auditor Dave Boliek.

Similar efforts by the legislature to take the elections board away from Stein’s predecessor, Roy Cooper, were ruled unconstitutional in multiple different court cases. These most recent changes were also blocked as likely unconstitutional by a trial court judge.

But this spring the Republican-majority on the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued an anonymous ruling that didn’t overturn that trial court order but allowed Republicans to take control of the elections board anyway, while the GOP’s appeal is underway. The court still hasn’t ruled on the merits of the case months later, and the judges have shown no outward interest in speeding up the case, which could drag on for years.

The Trump administration filed its lawsuit after the elections board flipped to GOP control. Reacting to the Trump lawsuit was one of the first actions of the new Republican majority on the board.