The Civil Rights Division is out with its first new voting case of the new Administration, and it comes directly out of the long-contested Riggs/Griffin race for the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In the Riggs/Griffin contest, there were three main categories of ballots contested after election day. The largest was a group of voters who allegedly never submitted driver’s license numbers or Social Security digits with their voter registration forms, in part because the state voter registration form at the time didn’t tell the voters they had to. There were reasons to believe that a sizable chunk of these voters actually did submit the relevant digits, which were just not captured in the state’s voter registration database (and other problems involving contesting not all of these voters, but only those voters who voted by mail, and contesting the ballots after the election). But I think it’s uncontested that the state voter registration form didn’t require the information that it should have, under HAVA, for some stretch of time.
[Update 5/29: the above paragraph used to say that the form “didn’t ask for the information,” which isn’t accurate: it was requested, but not required. h/t to Bob Hall for the correction.]
Now enter the DOJ. There’s a fair amount of throat-clearing in the complaint, but it boils down to an assertion that the state violated federal law by not requiring the right info when it registered voters. That … seems right.
What follows next is a little different: the remedy sought here is a bit legally tricky. Despite some early reports to the contrary, DOJ’s complaint does NOT assert that any voter should be purged or unregistered (and even if they were later to assert it, I don’t think that they have that authority). North Carolina was already in the process of fixing the voter registration form last year (and appears to have fixed it by now). The remedial portion that sticks out most is that DOJ wants to force the state to contact all North Carolina voters without a driver’s license number or Social Security digits in the system, to try to get the relevant numbers (and to just issue a unique ID number if they get no response), but it’s not clear that 1) all of the voters in the system without such a number actually failed to submit the right number, 2) that this is actually required by HAVA as a remedy, or 3) it would be all that big of a deal if the state sent such a note, properly phrased so as not to unnecessarily freak people out.
One saving grace: it’s extremely likely that there are large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats likely to be affected by the state’s glitch, and so unlike the cherry-picking in Judge Griffin’s contest, there’s reason for all actors involved not to be too terribly hamhanded about the resolution.