News-Record.com

Cross-posted from Capital Beat.

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This New York Times story has gotten people's attention this morning. It suggests that North Carolina is somehow using Social Security numbers to exclude people form the voter rolls.

State and local election officials I talked to this morning say that's simply not the case. I just posted this to online:

A report in the New York Times this morning saying that North Carolina is improperly using Social Security Numbers to vet voters was called “very misleading” by the state’s chief election official this morning.

The Times story said that North Carolina had been warned that it was checking an abnormally large number of social security numbers against a federal database and that federal officials were worried the state could be improperly excluding voters.

But Elections Director Gary Bartlett said Social Security Numbers were only being checked in the case where a drivers’ license or other acceptable form of identification has not been provided.

“We believe we’re in full compliance and they’re providing misinformation and stirring up the public and that is not good,” Bartlett said. The story, he said, has caused a non-stop stream of calls and e-mails to his office this morning.

North Carolina has registered more than 700,000 new voters since the beginning of the year and may top 800,000 by Nov. 1. Of those, about 400,000 have been run through the federal Social Security database.

The state, Bartlett said, had a high number of universities, military personnel and businesses that bring people in from out of state. Often those people don’t have drivers’ likenesses when they register to vote and therefore use their Social Security Number to verify their identity.

No one is denied registration if their Social Security number does not match said Bartlett and local elections officials.

“The worse case scenario is they show ID at the polls when they show up,” said Charlie Collicutt, deputy elections director in Guilford County.

If a voter still doesn’t have identification on Election Day, Bartlett said, they would be allowed to vote a provision ballot that will be counted once their information is confirmed.

Names are not removed from the voter rolls based on a Social Security number mismatch, said both state and county officials.

Bartlett said the state was contacted by neither the New York Times nor federal officials and today’s story was a surprise.

“No one has called us, no one has suggested we’re not in compliance,” Bartlett said.

Update: Three bits of updates for you:

• * A news release from Bob Hall at Democracy North Carolina taking up for the State Board of Elections:

  The harder problem continues to be cynical rumors and false information from ill-informed, sometimes well-intended, sources, now including the New York Times (and local re-printers who failed to check the story with state election officials). Certainly, there have been serious problems with lost ballots and election manipulation. The public should remain vigilant, and individuals with any doubts should confirm their registration status through websites like 2008ElectionConnection.com or by calling their local board of elections. What we don’t need are inflammatory stories about stolen elections or cheated voters that have no basis in fact.

• * A news release from Elections Director Gary Bartlett who gives in detail, and three part harmony, why the Times story was incorrect, at least as it pertains to North Carolina:

  No reporter for either publication contacted any one in this office to verify North Carolina’s procedures. Nor did the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration contact us before he released his allegations that North Carolina may be preventing voters from registering; instead he sent a letter to the Secretary of State, who does not administer elections in North Carolina, and we had to obtain a copy from a national organization.

• * And for you fun with numbers types, click here for the spreadsheet that started the mess.

Regarding that last bit, the folks at the Social Security Administration sent me that Excel file in response to my questions about what exactly they were thinking. Their press release is here, but essentially they said higher than expected usage of the database caught their attention.

Those higher volumes, according to administration spokesman Mark Lassiter, prompted worries that states may be improperly keeping people from registering to vote.

“It really was an issue of saying, ‘Look, we want to be sure that nobody who is registered to vote is prevented from doing so,’” Lassiter said.

Fair enough, I guess, but it basically sort of cast aspersions on the whole electoral process here in North Carolina without producing any evidence that anything was done wrong.

A few notes from the numbers game:

• * If you look at that spreadsheet, you'll see less than a quarter of the checks are coming up mismatched. So, if you're looking to exclude folks, this social security method wouldn't be the best way to go about it.

• * One thing that neither the New York Times nor Bartlett pointed out today was that this is North Carolina's first time as a battleground state in a presidential campaign. So in addition to military voters, college students and new people moving to the state, you're going to be registering a higher than normal number of people who have never voted before.