ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — The North Carolina State Board of Elections has identified about 34,000 deceased individuals on the state’s voter rolls after comparing records with the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, officials said.
On April 17, 2026, the board submitted 7,397,734 voter registration records to the SAVE system as part of an ongoing effort to improve the accuracy of the state’s voter list, according to state officials.
The match is part of a broader review intended primarily to verify the citizenship status of registered voters and ensure only eligible individuals remain on the rolls. Officials said the process also can reveal other discrepancies, including duplicate registrations, name mismatches and records of deceased voters.
“While we expected to find some cases, this is higher than we anticipated,” Sam Hayes, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said in a news release. “The benefit of entering into cross-state and federal database checks is that it allows us to uncover issues like this. Our goal is to use every available and legal tool at our disposal to achieve the most accurate voter rolls possible.”
Election officials said list maintenance is a routine requirement under state and federal law and stressed that the presence of deceased individuals on voter rolls does not indicate that votes were cast in their names.
The State Board said it will follow established procedures to verify the records and work with county boards of elections to remove deceased voters from the rolls. That process includes additional database checks and due process protections before any removals are made.
The SAVE system compares voter data — including names, dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers — against federal records maintained by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which coordinates with the Social Security Administration.
In North Carolina, death records are also regularly reported to the State Board by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, typically on a weekly basis and processed at the county level. Officials said the federal cross-check is intended to capture cases where voters may have moved to another state and later died without being removed from North Carolina’s rolls.
