UNC FactCheck: “Voter Integrity Project” spreading misinformation about absentee ballots, 9th District election

By Ari Sen

With additional reporting by Matthew Langston.

Last Wednesday night, President Donald Trump made a campaign stop in Greenville, North Carolina, at one-point highlighting 9th Congressional District candidate and fellow Republican Dan Bishop.

Though most of the news coverage from the event focused on the gathered crowd chanting “send her back,” a subversive effort to influence 9th Congressional District voters took place before attendees could even enter the packed auditorium.

As some waited in line to see the president, they received a flyer from a group calling itself the Voter Integrity Project. The flyer targets Senate Bill 683, a bipartisan bill designed to address absentee ballot fraud in wake of the absentee-ballot irregularities which took place in the 2018 9th District general election.

“Senate Bill 683 leaves in place some major loopholes that were designed into 2018’s hastily written voter ID law,” the flyer reads.

The statement also seems to refer to the deliberations over the implementation of North Carolina’s controversial voter ID laws in several misleading ways.

“Facing threats of legal action by the House Minority Leader, Republicans agreed to a long-sought Democrat dream of requiring photo ID for absentee-ballot voters,” the flyer claims.

In 2013,  House Minority Leader Darren Jackson (D-Wake) proposed amending House Bill 589, which would require an absentee ballot to be notarized or for the voter to include a copy of an authorized photo identification. The amendment failed, but the 2013 law passed and stood until it was struck down by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the November 2018 election, voters approved another voter ID law via a ballot measure.  On Dec. 5 and 6of 2018, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to approve Senate Bill 824, which implemented the voter ID initiative and specified which types of identification would be eligible to vote.

Also on Dec. 5, Rep. Elmer Floyd (D-Cumberland) introduced an amendment to the bill, which would require a form of identification to be attached with the request for an absentee ballot – or for the potential voter to complete an alternate sworn statement saying they can’t access a method to attach an electronic or physical copy of the identification. The amendment passed the House 106-1.

The Voter Integrity Project seems to have fixated on the second provision of the amendment.

“While the idea seemed reasonable, the devil was in the details,” the flyer reads about the amendment. “It allowed absentee voters to NOT provide an ID if they filled out a form, claiming a ‘Reasonable Impediment’ to copying their ID card.

 “Cumberland County Rep. Elmer Floyd’s amendment gutted the precious few security measures in NC’s absentee voting law,” the flyer later reads. 

On Dec. 14, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but his veto was later overturned by the Senate on Dec. 18, and then the House on Dec. 19.

The law has been challenged by the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center in a successful lawsuit but is awaiting review by the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

The group seems to be targeting Floyd and the new Senate bill based on largely unfounded concerns of widespread voter fraud.

“By not requiring (Department of Motor Vehicles) or SSN-4 (the last four digits of a Social Security number) data, non-U.S. citizens and non-persons can easily vote absentee,” one section of the flyer claims.

This claim is misleading, but to understand why requires further explanation.

To vote via absentee ballot, a person or their close relative or guardian must fill out an absentee ballot request form. Under current election law, to complete the form, the person filling it out must either provide an identification number such as a driver’s license number, DMV identification card number or the last four digits of a Social Security number – or submit a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or other government document containing a name and/or address.

It is correct that non-citizens can obtain any of these documents or identification numbers, but this is simply the first step in the process of voting absentee. It is unclear what the group is referring to when it says “non-persons.”

If no judicial challenges take hold, the new Voter ID law along with the Floyd amendment will take effect in 2020.

Once the request is received by the relevant board of elections office, a state election official will check if the requester is registered to vote. To register to vote, a person must complete a form in which they certify under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen of the United States and provide the same identification number or documentation required to vote via absentee ballot.

Election workers verify voters by cross-checking the state DMV database to see if a potential voter is flagged as being a “legal presence” customer, meaning they’re in the country legally but not a citizen. This use is authorized under North Carolina General Statute 163-82.19 and is conducted at least annually. The name is then run through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program (SAVE) database, though a 2016 post-election audit report said both databases can be unreliable.

If the SAVE database indicates a voter is a non-citizen, election workers open a case file and attempt to contact a potential voter to allow them to provide proof of citizenship. 

In short, for a non-citizen to vote via absentee ballot would require them to successfully register to vote, request a ballot, fill out the ballot, get it witnessed and submit it fraudulently while committing perjury at several points along the way – all while avoiding detection by election workers at each step.

All available evidence suggests that these types of incidents are exceedingly rare. A 2013 letter to North Carolina General Assembly said the office referred only 58 cases on non-citizen voter fraud to prosecutors between 2000 and 2012, when roughly 19.5 million votes were cast. Assuming every allegation were true, noncitizen votes would have amounted to only .0003 percent of the total.

Several national studies illustrate a similar picture.

A 2017 study by the Brennan Center, a non-partisan law and policy institute at NYU’s School of Law, found that of the 42 jurisdictions, which span 12 states and account for roughly 23.5 million votes, only 30 suspected incidents of non-citizen voter fraud were reported in 2016, or 0.0001 percent of all votes. Forty of the 42 districts reported no such incidents.

The reason for these low numbers may be the high cost if found guilty. Non-citizens who are found to have voted illegally can face fines, imprisonment for up to three years and/or deportation.

This isn’t the only way the group has sought to influence the 9th District election.

Stony Rushing, a Union County commissioner who came in second in the primary behind state Sen. Dan Bishop, has posted several articles from the group on a page tied to his campaign which contain false or misleading information about the 2018 general election, which was not certified because of absentee ballot irregularities.

The page, called “Stony Rushing Politics,” appears to be run by Rushing and has over 1,600 likes. 

Rushing received general election Republican winner Mark Harris’ endorsement in the primary. Harris did not run in the primary after allegations of fraud surfaced.

Several posts shared by the Rushing’s page seem to claim that the actions of political operative McCrae Dowless on Harris’ behalf were, in fact, legal under state elections law. A Wake County judge indicted Dowless and four of his associates in February on charges of illegal possession of absentee ballots and obstruction of justice.  

“Ballot harvesting is legal in North Carolina, as long as you get your story straight,” according to the first paragraph of the Voter Integrity Project’s internet post. “But here it is: State election officials accidentally outed their dirty secret a few weeks ago and then tried to bury it.”

In a State Board of Elections evidentiary hearing, Lisa Britt, an employee of Dowless – and the daughter of his ex-wife – testified that Dowless paid associates to collect ballots absentee ballots from voters, kept the ballots at his home and filled some in to favor Republican candidates. Britt also testified that Dowless and his associates forged witness signatures.

Dowless was previously convicted of felony perjury and felony insurance fraud in the 1990s.

Michael Bitzer, a Catawba College political science professor who discovered the ballot irregularities in the original race, said the post was misleading in several ways.

“In my interpretation of the blog piece, it is more of a Republican framing discounting what happened in Bladen County, to try and raise “red flags” about an issue that may seemingly be devious in and of itself,” Bitzer said in an email. “Interestingly, they don’t mention that, ultimately, Mark Harris himself, the Republican candidate who had denied all along the allegations and claimed victory, ended up asking the State Board of Elections to call for a new election.”

The group claims Dowless’ actions were legal under North Carolina General Statute 163A-1298, which cites the various felonies associated with absentee ballot handling. Section 1 of the law makes it a crime for anyone except a close relative or legal guardian to assist a voter in marking an absentee ballot. But it says, “if there is not a near relative or legal guardian available to assist the voter, the voter may request some other person to give assistance.”

For his part, Bitzer believes the statute only refers to assistance in marking the ballot, not in choosing candidates as Dowless is accused of doing.

“The Subsection 1 of General Statute 163A-1298 that they reference has an important qualifier that they conveniently don’t mention or ignored at the end: ‘the voter may request some other person to give assistance’ only deals with the marking of the ballot,” Bitzer said.

Bitzer also said the group’s post was misleading because voters must request assistance from someone else, not simply be approached, as was allegedly the case with Dowless’ operation.

“The way that I would read and interpret General Statute 163A-1298, Subsection 1 is that the impetus is on the voter, not an individual seeking to collect the ballot, to request the assistance for marking the ballot,” Bitzer said.

The group also makes no mention of Subsection 5 of the law, which says it is a felony “for any person to take into that person’s possession for delivery to a voter or for return to a county board of elections the absentee ballot of any voter,” aside from a close relative or guardian, as Dowless is accused of doing, Bitzer said.

Despite the group’s dubious claims, Rushing appears to have shown no signs that he will stop supporting the group or republishing its material. About two weeks ago, he reposted an op-ed from the group’s leader, Jay DeLancey, which appeared in the Burlington Times-News.

“Voting is the most sacred civic action we share as Americans,” DeLancey wrote in the opening paragraph of the piece. “No matter our income level, our sex, or our skin color, we all enjoy exactly the same freedom when we enter the voting booth … as long as everybody follows the rules.”

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