The leader of an "election protection" group reportedly told members of an activist group to flag voters with "Hispanic-sounding last names" when seeking to identify potentially suspicious registrations ahead of the elections in North Carolina.
Speaking to 1,800 volunteers at a virtual meeting, James Womack, chair of the Republican Party in Lee County, said: "If you've got folks that you, that were registered, and they're missing information... and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they've got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is a suspicious voter," he said, according to CBS News. "It doesn't mean they're illegal. It just means they're suspicious," he added.
The group in question is called the North Carolina Election Integrity Team and claims to investigate potential incidents of fraud in the battleground state. Womack said the organization is mostly comprised of retirees analyzing public records remotely. He claimed there are "corrupt voter lists" and that "individual citizens have a right to that information."
Republicans across the country have claimed that Democrats are spearheading an initiative to get millions of undocumented immigrants to vote in the elections. Former President Donald Trump and mogul Elon Musk have echoed the claims, describing them as a massive danger to the integrity of the electoral process.
Republican authorities have led efforts to reduce voter rolls, an example being Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Over the past few weeks, Paxton has sued Latino-heavy counties over plans to register voters via mail saying they "indiscriminately [invite] county residents to register to vote regardless of their eligibility."
He also sued Travis County after it decided to hire Civic Government Solutions to contact non-registered residents and encourage them to register.
On Monday, the final day to register to vote in Texas, Paxton went all in by requesting federal data to verify the citizenship status of over 450,000 registered voters, as Texas Public Radio reports. This group consists of individuals who did not use a state-issued driver's license or ID card when registering to vote, even though the state accepts several forms of identification when people register to vote beyond those two.
Republicans in North Carolina have also filed a lawsuit alleging noncitizens were registered to vote in the state, leading the Board of Elections shared it has removed nearly 750,000 registered voters.
The Board of Elections in the battleground state confirmed it removed an average of more than 1,200 voter records from the start of 2023 through August 2024, insisting "only ineligible records" were eliminated. Following the purge, North Carolina currently has nearly 7.7 million registered voters.
Studies have found no evidence to substantiate claims of widespread election fraud, and scholars argue that these concerns are not supported by data. The Brennan Center for Justice, for example, researched claims of illegal voting from politicians during the 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections and found that most allegations of fraud were baseless or due to clerical errors and other forms of election misconduct.
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