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.”
Full Article: Tea party group seeks voter roll purge ahead of 2016 | MSNBC.