A group with ties to the tea party and a Koch brothers-founded organization is helping election officials in North Carolina to remove thousands of duplicate registrations from the voter rolls ahead of next year’s elections. And it says it wants to do the same thing nationally.
The effort, announced early Monday by Houston-based True the Vote, is aimed at removing duplicates—when a voter’s name mistakenly appears twice. True the Vote has been accused by critics in the past of using intimidating tactics and stoking unwarranted fear about voter fraud.
True the Vote said it sent each of North Carolina’s 10 largest counties lists of potential duplicate registrations, based on similarities in the names, ages or addresses listed. It said five of the counties have told them they’re processing the data, and one, Guilford, has already removed 655 names from its rolls.
True the Vote said it’s currently compiling similar data for the 10 largest counties in two other 2016 swing states, Ohio and Colorado.
Charlie Collicutt, the elections director for Guilford County, N.C., told MSNBC that the data True the Vote provided was helpful and largely accurate. He said his office used it only as a tool, conducting its own checks by looking at names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers and voters’ signatures. No specific number of pieces of data had to match for a name to be removed, Collicutt said, but he stressed that staff erred on the side of caution, leaving a name on the rolls if there was any doubt about whether it was a duplicate.
“We did not just automatically go and start taking the names off that they provided,” Collicutt said. “If we felt that there was any reason to believe that it was different people, we didn’t do it.”
RELATED: What do two failed GOP candidates have in common? Voter ID
Guilford’s process appears to have been relatively careful. And almost everyone agrees that America’s voter rolls are riddled with duplicates and errors, which can prevent eligible voters from casting ballots and lead to long wait times at the polls.
But as important as they are, even well-intentioned efforts to clean up the rolls carry the risk that some legitimate voters will be wrongly purged—as occurred in Florida before the 2000 election, perhaps decisively, and again in the same state in 2012. That’s why most election administration experts say compiling data for use in removing names from the rolls should be done by impartial experts. Twelve states, plus the District of Columbia, participate in ERIC, a respected data-sharing program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts aimed at making voter rolls more accurate.
North Carolina has adopted legislation to join ERIC but has not yet done so. “Without commenting on True the Vote and the quality of its work, we do encourage states to join so they do the matching themselves rather than reacting to matching done by private groups that may be viewed as having a political agenda,” said John Lindback, the group’s executive director.
A similar program run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an outspoken advocate for stricter voting and voter registration rules, has caused more controversy. Last year, Florida and Oregon dropped out of the program, citing unreliable data.
True the Vote, which was launched in 2009 as an offshoot of a Houston tea party group, King Street Patriots, has a record that arguably inspires even less confidence. A 2012 New York Times editorial described the group’s M.O.:









