Fact Check:  Were 54% of commercial driver licenses in North Carolina issued illegally to noncitizens?

This week's fact check of North Carolina politics looks at a claim about former Gov. Roy Cooper, who is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate this fall. He’s running against Republican Michael Whatley. In a social media post earlier this month, the Republican National Committee said, “54% of North Carolina commercial driver’s licenses were issued illegally to foreign nationals. More Americans are put in harm's way every day because of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper.” For more, Paul Specht of WRAL joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.

Marshall Terry: Just so we’re clear, what sorts of jobs do you need a commercial driver's license for, and what authority does the governor have over issuing them in North Carolina?

Paul Specht: Oh gosh, you would need a commercial driver's license to drive a tractor trailer, a semi-truck. You can imagine how many different businesses depend on something like that. The governor, he has indirect oversight over the North Carolina DMV. He gets to appoint the commissioner of the DMV.

Terry: Did the state actually illegally issue 54% of North Carolina commercial driver's licenses to foreign nationals? I mean, that's more than half. It just sounds, on the face of it, really high.

Specht: Right, that would mean every other license was issued illegally, and that's not the case. But I can tell you where that number comes from. Back in January, the U.S. Department of Transportation sent a letter to the DMV, and they said, ‘Hey, we've conducted an audit of a sample of your records.’

They looked at 50 records issued to non-citizens. Now, non-citizens can get commercial driver's licenses, so long as they're in the country legally and meet some other criteria. And they found that of those 50, 27 of the records had some sort of administrative issue and should not have been issued without further investigation on the DMV's part.

The main issue was that the license lasted longer than the driver was allowed to be in the United States. DMV officials told us, ‘We can fix that, and when we found these issues, we sent a letter to the driver and said, hey, you need to go back to the DMV within 20 days so we can fix this.’

So that's where that 54% number comes from. They took a sample of 50 licenses and found issues with 27 of them.

After they received that letter from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the North Carolina DMV did its own more robust audit of its commercial driver's licenses. They have more than 325,000 commercial driver's licenses active as of this year. Of those, a little more than 8,000 were issued to non-citizens. Now, of those, a little more than 1,100 were issued erroneously. There was some sort of step that they missed, or that there was some sort of administrative error. So, 1,100 of the state’s 325,000 commercial driver's licenses were issued with some sort of error. That actually comes out to a percentage of 0.35% of all commercial licenses had an error, less than 1%.

Terry: So the actual number was lower by a factor of more than 100 compared to what the RNC was saying?

Specht: That's what the DMV says.

Terry: So what's been the response from the RNC?

Specht: Well, the RNC, when we shared the DMV's data with them and said, ‘Hey, this is what they're telling us,’ they said the Trump administration should get credit for pointing out these problems and for inspiring, for lack of a better word, the North Carolina DMV to clean up its records. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of what they said.

Now, it's hard to determine where the state would be without the U.S. DOT's letter. One thing I may have failed to mention: When the U.S. Department of Transportation sent its letter in January, they did tell the North Carolina DMV, ‘If you don't clean up these processes, if you don't fix these licenses, then we could withhold federal funding.’

I'm fairly certain that that played a role in motivating the DMV officials. However, it's also important to point out that North Carolina was not alone. The U.S. Department of Transportation looked at 25 other states and found issues elsewhere too.

Terry: So how did you rate this claim?

Specht: Remember, the RNC said that 54% of North Carolina's commercial driver's licenses were issued illegally to foreign nationals. There's no other context given in this social media post. That's just not true. It is 0.35% of North Carolina's commercial licenses that had an error. That's why we rated it false.

These fact checks are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL.