From the Daily Herald in the Roanoke Valley and Lake Gaston area:
A group aiming to ensure fair elections paid a visit to Halifax County to clean up the voter registration rolls Tuesday morning.
At 10 a.m. Tuesday, Jay DeLancy, of Raleigh, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, and Richard Scott, of Scotland Neck, a volunteer with the group, walked into the offices of the Halifax County Board of Elections to present a list of 77 names of people they say have died between 2008 and 2011, yet remain on the rolls in the county as registered voters.
“We’ve all heard stories of ‘dead people voting’ in Illinois,” DeLancy said. “So volunteers from all across the state want our election officials to scrub our voter rolls before Chicago-style politics can take over North Carolina.”
DeLancy said a North Carolina General Statute requires state election officials to give names of deceased persons to county boards of election each month, and those local boards are required to remove those names from the list. DeLancy said relatives of registered voters may also go to their county board of elections and present a death certificate to have their relative removed from the rolls.
DeLancy said his group’s research shows all 100 of the state’s counties have deceased people on their rolls, and over the next several weeks, the group is aiming to present those lists to each county, including, he said, Northampton County.
The next step, DeLancy said, is taking on lists of other ineligible voters, such as non-U.S. citizens and convicted felons.
Presenting these lists, which are officially listed as challenges, requires a registered voter from that county. Scott said he was happy to present the list for the organization.
“We want to ensure we have a fair, honest and efficient election system,” Scott said. “If we head off (problems such as this) in advance, we don’t have to worry about it. I’d rather be proactive than reactive.”
DeLancy said while the group was dismayed to learn all the state’s counties have some, the 77 names in Halifax is a relatively low number. He said the group has learned not many of those deceased voters have actually voted.
“But whenever that happens, it means someone has just committed a felony and it also means that other law-abiding citizens are getting their votes cancelled,” DeLancy said.
The group is a non-partisan organization interested only in verifying election integrity, not in advocating any political party’s ideology, according to DeLancy.
“The party that has controlled the voting process in North Carolina for 140 years assures us there’s no voter fraud in North Carolina,” he said. “We just want to verify that.”
