An Alexandria, Virginia-based public interest law firm focused on election integrity says it has identified more than 1,200 duplicate voter registration records on North Carolina’s voter rolls in 10 of the state’s largest counties.
Guilford and Cumberland counties accounted for more than 50% of the duplicate registrations.
Logan Churchwell, research director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), told Carolina Journal in a phone interview on Wednesday that the duplicate registrations stem from the same person being registered multiple times under variations of their own name.
“Someone living at 123 Main Street could be registered twice because at one point, they went to the DMV and filled out all the forms, had all the documents,” he gave as an example. “The Social Security number was part of the transaction and gets registered to vote, but later on, moves across the county and is grocery shopping, and some canvasser with a clipboard says, hey, do you want to register to vote? He’s like, oh yeah, I moved, I guess I better update that, but he’s uncomfortable providing his Social Security number down on that clipboard.”
Churchwell said a middle initial could be omitted, a middle name could be written out, or a person could have used a nickname when registering. Differences in punctuation, symbols, or extra spaces could also prevent records from matching. Combined with missing identifying information, such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, those variations could create a duplicate record unintentionally.
PILF has been monitoring North Carolina and other states since 2019, noticing that a few, including North Carolina, have had a history of duplicate registrations.
The organization urged state officials in March 2022 to clean up North Carolina’s voter rolls before the 2022 election.
At that time, PILF raised a number of concerns. The first being over voter registrations belonging to deceased individuals. The group reported that 7,933 registrations belonging to people it identified as deceased remained on North Carolina’s voter rolls in 2020, some “long after death.”
PILF’s second concern involved people registered to vote in more than one state. The group reported that 42,984 North Carolina voters had “left the state and established or renewed their out-of-state voter registration” before the 2020 election.
Their third concern focused on same-address duplicate voter registrations. PILF reported that 13,525 people appeared to be registered twice in North Carolina under variations of the same name.
In 2024, the North Carolina Audit Force (NCAF), a group that uses publicly available voter registration data to “verify it coincides with the truth,” found similar discrepancies among records with matching names, addresses, and birth years. The group also said it found instances in which both records for an apparent duplicate were credited with voting.
PILF also alerted the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) in August 2025 to what it described as several issues, including 29,414 apparent interstate duplicate registrants, more than 12,700 apparent same-address duplicate or triplicate registrants, and 613 placeholder or fictitious date-of-birth entries.
Churchwell told CJ that the NCSBE has made significant progress, especially since the new board was appointed last year, with Sam Hayes at the helm as executive director.
One of the ways the board has taken action is with the Registration Repair Project, a major initiative to collect missing identification numbers from roughly 103,000 registered voters whose records lack required ID information.
Under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), voter registration applicants who have a current and valid driver’s license must provide the license number. Other applicants must provide the last four digits of their Social Security number, unless they have neither number, in which case the state assigns a unique identifying number.
For nearly a decade, however, North Carolina’s voter registration form lacked clear instructions, resulting in tens of thousands of registrations being submitted without the required information. The registration application was corrected in Jan. 2024.
As of Oct. 1, the state board has resolved 41,200 incomplete voter registrations or 40% of the 103,000, with 63,000 remaining, according to NCSBE spokesman Jason Tyson.
“The state board took it upon themselves to do an audit of the completeness and accuracy of the Social Security data that’s kept inside of their voter system, and this caused a bit of an uproar when they initiated it,” Churchwell told CJ. “They were always worried about people getting knocked off the voter rolls, and it didn’t really pan out that way, but what looks like they’re just doing some bookkeeping, they were actually making progress on their duplicate voter registration problem.”
While PILF recognizes the progress, Churchwell said the organization is alerting the State Board to more potential duplicates so that officials can examine the records and make system changes to resolve the issue.
Churchwell also noted that North Carolina’s mobile population makes maintaining its voter rolls particularly challenging. He said the original voter registration software may not have anticipated all the name variations entered into the system. Because an outside vendor supplies voter registration systems to North Carolina and other states, he said, identifying and correcting problems in the original code can take years.
PILF has requested a response from NCSBE by Oct. 13. Tyson told CJ on Friday that they are drafting a letter to send to the organization.
“The ultimate point we’re approaching here is we don’t want to play Whack-a-Mole with the state,” Churchwell told CJ. “Duplicates are going to happen. People are going to die. The voter roll is a constant work in progress, but instead of just saying, “Look at these duplicates,” you should do something about it. What we’re trying to present to them is that there are duplicates, we need to do something about it, but we need to approach this from a systems-level solution, and not just merging these records that should merge together and move on.”
He added that PILF and the NCSBE will want to continue keep doing corrective patch work.
“They want a software solution to the software problem that they seem to be suffering from, although they’ve made incredible strides in correcting it, but this is an iterative process, and this is hopefully helping them get to that last stage of resolving this issue for good,” Churchwell said.
Although PILF is requesting additional voter list maintenance, Churchwell wants to assure voters that eliminating duplicate registrations would not prevent eligible ballots from being counted.
“We’re not playing gotcha,” Churchwell said. “We’re not trying to prevent people from voting. In fact, let’s say North Carolina took every single scrap of data we had and implemented it all. Not a single person would lose their voter registration. They would just lose their second one.
PILF plans to continue reviewing North Carolina’s voter registrations each year, beginning in late summer or early fall.