State Board of Elections Executive Director Sam Hayes issued the following statement on today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the SAVE database:
“The State Board welcomes today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both the United States Constitution and the North Carolina Constitution are clear: you must be a citizen of the United States to register and vote in our elections.
“The SAVE database is one of the few tools we can access to make sure that non-citizens are not on our voter rolls. It also helped us identify over 35,000 deceased registrants on our voter list following a recent search of the system.
“As the State’s chief elections officer, I have a statutory duty to conduct voter list maintenance, and I intend to use every legal means at my disposal to carry out that duty. We wish to reiterate that no voters will be automatically removed as a result of any voter list maintenance we do utilizing the database.”