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The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Tuesday against North Carolina election officials targeting the registration records of potentially hundreds of thousands of registered voters in the state.
The new lawsuit alleges the North Carolina State Board of Elections violated the Help America Vote Act by failing to collect and record voters’ driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. It pivots off of an argument made by a GOP state Supreme Court candidate who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his defeat to a Democratic incumbent.
The Trump administration is asking for a court order that would require election officials to contact the registered voters in North Carolina who, according to the lawsuit, lack that information in their registration records. The lawsuit says a “significant number” of registered voters lack the information, and it references an earlier administrative complaint with the board that estimated the number to be more than 200,000 registered voters.
In a statement, board Executive Director Sam Hayes said that he only recently became aware of the lawsuit but that the “failure to collect the information required by HAVA has been well documented.”
“Rest assured that I am committed to bringing North Carolina into compliance with federal law,” Hayes said.
The new lawsuit follows through on priorities for President Donald Trump’s second-term Justice Department, which administration officials have said would focus on cleaning voting rolls and rooting out election fraud. Several voting rights lawsuits brought by the prior administration have been dismissed by the new leadership. The head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, has made comments welcoming a mass exodus of career DOJ attorneys, describing them as being unwilling to execute the agenda of the president whom Americans put in the office.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in US elections. The lawsuit references an election rules overhaul Trump is trying to implement nationwide through an executive order.
“The cornerstone of public trust in government lies in free and fair elections. The core of the compact between a state and its citizens rests in ensuring that only eligible citizens can vote in elections,” the complaint says.
With the new case, the department is following up on legal claims made by Judge Jefferson Griffin, who lost last year by 734 votes to state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.
Griffin argued that the ballots of some 60,000 voters who lacked the ID numbers in their registration records should be thrown out, an argument that the Republican-leaning North Carolina Supreme Court rejected. In its ruling, the state Supreme Court noted Griffin had presented no evidence that a “significant number” of these 60,000 votes “were cast by individuals whose identity was not verified by voter identification or who were not otherwise qualified to vote.” The court did rule in favor of challenges Griffin was bringing to a smaller pool of ballots, but that ruling was blocked by a federal judge. Griffin backed down from the legal fight earlier this month.
Unlike Griffin’s retrospective arguments, the court order that the Justice Department seeks is forward-looking, as the DOJ is demanding a sweeping process for updating the voter registrations of the 200,000 individuals said to be missing the numbers in the state’s database.
If a voter reports lacking the ID numbers in question when contacted by state election officials, under the process the DOJ lawsuit proposes, they would be assigned a special identifying number. The lawsuit, however, does not make clear whether the affected voters who do not respond to outreach from election officials should be purged from the rolls entirely. A spokesperson for the DOJ did not respond to CNN’s request for clarity.
Clerical errors that led to voters’ ID numbers to not be recorded were flagged to North Carolina election officials well before the dispute over the state Supreme Court race, and they were subject to an unsuccessful Republican Party lawsuit brought before the 2024 election. The board has already fixed the registration forms that failed to list the ID numbers as required information.
The new DOJ lawsuit, however, takes issue with the “ad hoc” plan the state board has put forward for updating the existing registrations missing the information – by having county officials collect it if and when those voters show up at polling places to vote. State law requires voters to show photo ID when they cast a ballot.
Until recently, the majority of the election board’s members were appointees of the Democratic governor. The board was recently reconfigured to be majority-Republican appointees, under a law passed by North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature last year just before Republicans lost their supermajority in the state Capitol.
Hayes was appointed as the board’s new executive director by Republican majority.
CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz and Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.
