It’s time for a fact check of North Carolina politics. We’re looking at a post on X by Shiloh Marx, president of the Integrity First Alliance. Referring to the 2024 election, Marx wrote, “Governor Josh Stein won North Carolina by 828,187 votes. North Carolina processed 1,031,350 duplicate registrations.” For more, Paul Specht of WRAL joined our Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: The implication this post is making is that some voters cast more than one ballot in 2024, leading to Stein’s victory. Before we get more into that, what is the Integrity First Alliance and how much traction is this post from July getting?
Paul Specht: It looks like it's an independent group that advocates for election integrity, basically. They want states around the country to update and clean their voter rolls. More than 100,000 people saw this post on X.
Terry: What are duplicate registrations?
Specht: So a duplicate registration is when someone is already registered to vote and then they sign up again for whatever reason.
Election officials told me that this is fairly common. Someone is registered to vote and then they go, say, to the DMV and they're asked verbally or on a form, ‘Do you want to register to vote?’ They might think, ‘Oh, am I registered? I can't remember. Yeah, I might as well just fill out this paperwork.’ That would be considered a duplicate registration. It also happens, they say, during voter registration drives.
Terry: So did North Carolina process more than a million duplicate registrations, as Marx says? And if so, did it have any bearing on the 2024 election? Can people vote twice?
Specht: No, state officials say people cannot vote twice. Let's talk about that word ‘process,’ and let me tell you what it actually means. The person in this hypothetical scenario is already signed up to vote. Let's say they go to the DMV, they fill out the form and sign up again. That goes to the local county board of elections.
They have people who take that form and then they compare it to a statewide database that shows people who are already registered. If I'm already in there and there's no change in my registration, no change in my name, no change in my address, no change in my party affiliation, then nothing happens. You are not added to the voter rolls twice. You do not get to vote twice. That was the case with these over 1 million duplicate registrations. The state election officials told us that even if someone was accidentally added to the voter rolls twice, that database would still block them from voting twice. Election officials say these duplicate registrations have no bearing on any election results.
Terry: How does this fit in the broader landscape where Republicans, including President Trump, are trying to cast doubt on the whole electoral process?
Specht: Some people are skeptical that elections will be conducted fairly. At PolitiFact, we've seen this throughout the years. Before the 2024 election, we fact-checked a claim that was sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum, where people on social media accused the state elections board of removing 700,000 registration records. So this is just sort of, unfortunately, part of the ebb and flow of political rhetoric, with people sort of crying foul with any news that comes out about voter registrations and updates to the voter rolls.
Terry: So how did you rate this claim?
Specht: Half true. That's because there were, as Mr. Marx pointed out, a million duplicate voter registrations. However, there's so much missing context here. The way he presented it certainly could leave someone with the impression that the duplicate registrations had some effect on the 2024 elections, and that's not the case.
These fact checks are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL.
