The State Board of Elections took a step toward strengthening election integrity in North Carolina during its meeting on Tuesday.
Board members voted to authorize 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 will allow the State Board to compare North Carolina’s voter registration records with citizenship data in USCIS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
The comparison will help verify that individuals on the state’s voter rolls are U.S. citizens, as required by law. The memorandum is expected to take several weeks to finalize.
“This is one of the few tools available to us to check for noncitizens on our voter rolls,” Hayes said. “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, as well as other authorized entities, to verify the citizenship or immigration status of individuals for benefits, licenses and other lawful purposes.
“The Texas secretary of state’s office recently entered into a similar agreement,” Hayes said. “After running its entire voter list — more than 18 million records — through the SAVE database, the office identified 2,724 potential noncitizens registered to vote in Texas.”