In addition to examining voter rolls, Voter Integrity Project – North Carolina has also taken more hands-on approaches to checking voter registrations. Volunteers have gone so far as to knock on the doors of residences that appear to have improper registrations:
“The only way you can have really ethical elections is for people to vote from where the actually have a dog in the fight.”
Gautam Hathi:
And then also to get into the process that you’ve been going through for finding improper registrations and challenging them, we know from what we’ve read that in addition to the jury rolls and looking at the voter rolls you also sort of went door to door as well in some places. And that just seemed really interesting. So we wanted to hear about what was that like? Did you meet anyone who you found was improperly registered or any of these things, and what were your interactions with them like? Can you talk a little bit about that process?
Jay DeLancy:
Certainly. It was an epiphany, to go and meet these people. There was a 70 year old man, who lives in Buncombe County in Asheville, and he loved knocking on doors and doing this. And what we were doing was we realized that to really get these people off the roll what we’re looking for is people who no longer live where they’re voting from, you know. That’s poor grammar, but, you know, if they don’t live there they shouldn’t be voting there because they’re affecting local elections. And you know, it’s like a drop in the bucket, and we knew that, but we wanted to demonstrate the extent of the problem. It’s a lot bigger than we were able to demonstrate. What we were doing, we would find these people that were on the rolls and True the Vote’s method was get them off the roles, report them to the election officials and get them off the rolls. They didn’t know North Carolina law. There’s only one way to get them off the roll and that’s to file a challenge. And I’m never going to ask anyone to file a challenge unless I’m convinced they have enough evidence that it’s legit. I talked one guy into withdrawing a challenge once because of that. He just said, “I know they’re not there!” I said, “you better do more than that, you know you’re not going to walk into a hearing and tell them you know this. You’re going to bring some proof or don’t ever mention my name again.” And he heard it and fixed it. But what we we’re doing was we’d go up and if we had five or six people at a residence we’d go up and knock on the door and say yeah, and say, Are you so and so? No. Well, I’m with Voter Integrity Project and we are checking to see, did you know that five people are registered to vote at this house. That’s a conversation starter, and most of the time people are like, What? Let me see that. Oh yeah, that’s my son, he moved away 20 years ago, that’s my whatever. And they’d go through it and they’d help us fill out the form and then we used that as our evidence. Because North Carolina law says prima facie evidence is a letter returned from the post office, but we decided that’s time consuming and depends on the post office doing their job – there’s too many moving parts. Let’s just talk to the person who lives there and get their word, get them to attest to that on a piece of paper. And we’ll take that to the hearing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Cause each county has their own little political agenda and sometimes they’ll go, “wow, you got to mail a letter.” No we don’t. We don’t have to. The law says if we do that’s perfect but, you know, this a homeowner from that address, and so it’s been interesting, because in one county, the very same county, one time we had a guy walk in there and say – it was a guy that we had showed him the data – and he said “I want to do this myself.” He went to the hearing and he said, “yeah I live in that house and those people don’t, I want them off the rolls.” And they said “okay,” and they voted okay. Another time that happened and they said, “no, you got to mail a letter.” And so they didn’t even remember their own precedent they’d set. And so it’s just a real fuzzy area of law. The whole intent of the law – it’s designed so that the people who are governed can control who’s on that list. And the age old technique is called canvassing. And it’s perfectly, the political science major you would know, okay, not you, but your partner in crime here would know that it’s just the way it is. They always advocate canvassing and there’s nothing wrong with that. And so what we’re doing is canvassing to see who actually lived there and who doesn’t. And why Buncombe? Because people in Buncombe wanted to do it. It’s something that we encourage people to do it but it’s locally derived and then we mentor them and coach them on how to do it.
Gautam Hathi:
You say that most of the people who you met were supportive and people were interested to know about this stuff.
Jay DeLancy:
Yes, a couple of them weren’t. Yeah, did you meet anyone who was… I didn’t, Bill did. I couldn’t believe it. Who could slam the door in the face of a seventy year old man? He’s the sweetest man you ever knew. It was just like are you kidding? But some did. We made a mistake too on a couple of them, because Bill at the time, we thought, just go out and challenge them anyway Bill, let’s see what happens. And that was not a good move, we learned. We’re not going to do that again. I met one that was really cool thought. I was a lady that was in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She was, excuse me, she’s probably deceased now, and she had oxygen and a sign on the front porch saying no smoking and they had eight people registered at her house and her daughter said it was her brothers and sisters and it was a little tiny, it was a black lady, and it was a little tiny house. She said, you know, they don’t live here know, but we all did and we all use this address. And I thought, culturally I had never realized that this is home and they all vote from home. It’s illegal, but I’m not going to challenge it. I thought, you know what, I see what you’re saying. So we didn’t challenge that and it really has changed the way we do it. When I see this kind of thing going on, we want to be gentle, and we don’t want to be the bullies that walk in and say, “Get those kids off!” But, technically it is wrong and we’d like to see them fix that, and I explained to them that they really should be voting wherever they live, and she goes, Well they come here and sleep here once or twice a week. I’m not going to argue with that because their mother’s dying and it’s like, okay. But really, once you’ve grown up, where you live under North Carolina law is where you’re supposed to vote, and that’s the only way you can have really ethical elections is for people to vote from where they actually have a dog in the fight.
Gautam Hathi:
And so, in the cases where people were unhappy or upset, they just sort of slammed the door in your face? You didn’t have any extended conversations with those people for the most part?
Jay DeLancy:
No, we never had that. No, people were generally… generally they were amazed. And they were impressed and they were very supportive.
