NC elections board unanimously votes to allow fight of ICE’s voter records subpoena
North Carolina’s elections board recently voted unanimously to allow the state Attorney General to fight subpoenas of voting records issued by ICE and the Trump administration.
ICE had asked for “all voter registration applications, federal write-in absentee ballots, federal post card applications, early-voting application forms, provisional voting forms, absentee ballot request forms, all ‘admission or denial of non-citizen return forms,’ and all voter registration cancellation or revocation forms from Jan. 1, 2010 through Aug. 30, 2018,” according to a letter sent by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein to the U.S. attorney’s office asking them to withdraw the subpoenas. Following an executive board meeting conducted behind closed doors, Joshua Malcolm, vice-president of the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, released a statement to the public outlining the decision:
“The subpoena we’ve received was and remains overly broad, unreasonable, vague, and clearly impacts significant interests of our voters. This Board will… not stand idly by and consent to any agency attempting to obtain records and documents that violate the principles of overreach by the federal government, as in this circumstance.”
The unanimous decision was handed down by a board consisting of four Democrats, four Republicans and one Independent.
Both Stein’s office and the North Carolina elections board say handing over an estimated 15 million documents requested by ICE and the federal government would be entirely too burdensome.
ICE is presumably using this data to compile arrest rosters, much like it tried to do in Philadelphia before being denied access to a system they were accused of abusing to conduct raids on undocumented citizens of Philadelphia.