Bamboozling the Lawmakers
[Note: This article was updated and had typos corrected on Jan 7, 2024, after it was mentioned in a lawsuit against SRD reforms. While lawmakers never seemed to care about its contents, the Left sure did! We’ll have more to say about that lawsuit at a later date.]
March 3, 2023 — The longstanding tradition of election officials hiding the problems with Same Day Registration (SDR) voting in North Carolina continued this week when the current Director, Karen Brisson-Bell danced around a direct question from Representative Frank Iler (Brunswick) regarding “any problems” possibly hidden from lawmakers.
If reading is not your thing, you can click the video link at the bottom of this post and fast forward through 55 seconds of Rep Iler’s slobbering love affair with Director Bell. After that, you’ll get his question and hear KBB’s response. Here is the transcript of the key exchange:
Rep Iler began the dialogue here: “The question is one stop voting. It’s a great convenience? Yes… registering and voting on the same day uh… now my question is when you’re getting near the end of early voting, is [sic.] there any challenges trying to verify . . . by Election Day or [garbled] by canvas day, verifying, are they really eligible to vote because they’ve registered and voted on the same day. Is there a challenge there? Is there any number that did not get verified?”
KBB: “That’s a great question. Thank you for all the compliments… [giggles and banters back and forth with Iler about great election workers before answering his question.] To that, I’ll say we need to remember that with same-day registration that’s allowed only in North Carolina during early voting and not on election day. When someone comes in to same-day register, they have to present documentation that indicates their address. So that’s a verification that, when we go through normal voter registration processes, and someone completes the form, and we do a verification mailing for any voter who registers, but they aren’t having to present documentation at the time of registering if they do so outside of same day registration. When they come to same-day register, there’s an added layer of verification, and then we do go through the mailing process. Um…you know, are there ones who may come back with [?] their verifications? That’s very small because we have had that documentation upfront? I’m not gonna stand up here and say it’s 100%, but we do have the ability to challenge those ballots and to remove them during the canvas period.”
Iler: “I know the canvas is 10 days after the election, but there are some… The mail doesn’t come back in time I suppose and they aren’t really verified, but it’s a small number maybe…”
Me (whispering too loudly to Jim Womack): “I need to talk to that guy.”
KBB: I don’t have data on that off the top of my head, but we’re getting into very minuscule numbers because of that verification that happens when they do same day register. Um, so, I think that is the point to make sure that is understood.”
We Have the Receipts
Researchers within the VIP Universe have studied this vexing problem since 2012, when control of the Buncombe County Commission swung on a single race won by a Democrat who had all kinds of tricks played by election officials in order for the Democrat to pull out an 18-vote steal “win.” Four months after the election, we discovered 64 SDR voters who had never been verified by election officials.
Now, we don’t dispute all of what KBB told Rep Iler, but since that Buncombe County discovery, we have researched this mater in a number of ways and we dispute the “minuscule” amount of unverified SRD voters in the system.
We conducted controlled mailings that were sent out the day after the SDR voter emerged in the absentee voter files. I explained the process in a podcast linked here, but the bottom line was that more than 6.4% of our confirmation mailings were returned by the post office, marked “undeliverable.”
In a more limited 2018 study of this this problem, one of our confirmation mailings was returned by the Post Office, just under 19 months after we sent it to the voter, using the address in their registration file.
And lest we forget, in November 2020, we embarrassed a Bladen County election officials after learning that, 17 days after the election, they had still not sent the first mailing to their 392 SDR voters.
Since the returned mail is the only way for election officials to deny an SDR voter, it’s tragic that none of the mailings would be returned prior to the Nov 24 canvass that year.
Bladen County Commissioner Cogdill won his seat by just 11 votes, so we thought the losing candidate might have had grounds for a protest . . . except for one small problem: Election officials had broken no law and the Republican loss had no impact on which party controlled the Commission.
We’re convinced that the only reason “minuscule” amounts are being returned is because many counties delay sending them out until after the election is certified and all the votes–even the illegal ones they avoided finding–are counted.
Ways to Fix SDR
The easiest option is to do nothing.With around 6% being returned undeliverable, and around 100,000 or more SDR voters in every federal election NC has had since 2012, that means more than 6,000 illegal votes, statewide.
Remember, in 2020, Paul Newby won his statewide election for Supreme Court Chief Justice by around 400 votes. Even a Carolina student would get this math: 6000>400 so doing nothing could make a difference in a close election.
At the other extreme, the hardest option is to get rid of SDR entirely. We call this the best choice, but a 3-judge federal court in Richmond threw out the 2013 law that attempted to end the fraud-friendly voting method. They said the Legislature was “racist” for even thinking such a notion. It was part of that “surgical precision” poetry one of the judges penned.
So, besides killing it, here are a couple of ways to fix it.
One method, endorsed by the NC Election Integrity Team is to turn all SDR votes into provisional ballots that require election officials to verify the correct voter residence before the canvass.
Another approach VIP has suggested is to require election boards to mail each SDR voter a “confirmation” packet by forwardable mail, which includes a postage-paid return envelope and a form letter that the new voter would have to sign and return before the canvass in order for their vote would count.
As long has the return envelope is send by forwardable mail and includes a pre-paid, pre-addressed envelope, such confirmation mailings are allowed under Section 8(d) of the NVRA (see Sec d of 42 USC 1973gg-6). The warning each SDR voter would get when they vote is to “keep an eye on your mailbox and return that letter immediatly, or your vote will not count.”
Needless to say, any tinkering with this horrible law will draw massive incoming litigation lawfare. After all, the Left never allows states to claw back defective election laws.
Other tinkering that might survive without litigation includes retaining the voters’ address-verification documents and posting them on the NCSBE website within 24 hours of the SDR voter being allowed to vote (subject to privacy redactions).
We like that idea because there’s a breakdown somewhere and election officials are oblivious to it. If everybody is obeying the law, the voter comes in with some sort of document proving they get mail at their claimed address. We accept it as a fact that some election officials skip the address verification and take the word of the voter. How else could we get nearly a 7% rejection rate?
And finally, one simple fix is to define the meaning of “tentative determination,” as directed in NCGS §163–82.7. Back when this law was concocted, partisan bill drafters used this term to keep the public asleep on the fraud-friendly nature of SDR. The law (§163-82.7) requires election officials to “make a tentative determination that the applicant is qualified to vote at the address given. . . within a reasonable time.”
The few remaining honest CBE Directors will send out the new SDR voter’s registration card within 24-48 hours. Others will leverage the loopholes by waiting 24 days or even 24 months. There is no guidance or enforcement over what “reasonable” means.
There’s also no guidance on how to conduct a “tentative determination.” It’s not in the statutes. It’s not in the NC Administrative Code and we could find no reference to it in the Numbered Memos that the NCSBE issues on a number of occasions.
Was the omission of clarity on those two terms (“reasonable” and “tentative”) a product design flaw? Or was it a product feature? Considering who worked so hard to get this horrible law enacted before Obama’s 2008 bid, we suspect the latter.
The brilliant Susan Myrick, formerly at NC Civitas, conducted studies on this problematic voting method in the May 2012 primary. Her protocol involved a full canvass of all SDR voters in five counties. They sent 17,531 survey letters and 531 were returned “undeliverable” by the post office. That’s 7.3 percent.
The benefactor of our current election director, Gary Bartlett, scoffed at the Civitas finding and claimed that only 218 SDR registrations had failed.
It’s amazing how few letters are retuned when CBE Directors drag their feet on mailing them.
Fun facts: That first election with SDR featured more than 300,000 new voters using the SDR loophole and ACORN’s presence in NC that year was remarkable. They even managed to get caught making fraudulent registrations. But don’t worry. Bartlett didn’t push for prosecutions and nobody got in trouble.
Obama won the state by 14,000 votes.
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