On April 16, 2026, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 3–2, along party lines, to adopt permanent rules (08 NCAC 23 .0101–.0104) that will use an unreliable federal database to challenge and remove North Carolinians from the voter rolls. Effective June 2026, these rules were adopted over the objections of more than 15,000 public commenters, multiple voting rights organizations, and legal experts who warned the State Board that it would disenfranchise thousands of lawful citizens.
“This Board was warned in documented and unambiguous terms that these rules would strip lawful citizens of their most fundamental right,” said Brian Kennedy, Senior Policy Analyst. “They heard 15,000 voices — neighbors, veterans, naturalized citizens, women who built lives in this state — and passed these rules anyway. This is not governance but a deliberate effort to strip lawful voters of their freedom to vote, right before an election that has clear implications on the future of our democracy.”
The rule relies on a system called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), a notoriously unreliable federal database, to flag and remove registered voters suspected of not being citizens. Democracy North Carolina has formally opposed these rules and the reason is straightforward: proponents claim this protects election integrity, but the data simply does not support that case.
A nationwide Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found that across 42 jurisdictions covering 23.5 million votes, election officials referred just 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation. That is 0.0001% of all votes cast. Forty of those 42 jurisdictions reported zero known incidents of noncitizen voting. In the counties with the largest noncitizen populations in the country, nearly all reported zero incidents. In California, Virginia, and New Hampshire — the very states where noncitizen voting was claimed to be rampant — not a single election official could identify one instance of it happening.