What State Board of Elections Executive Director Sam Hayes says he saw as a sensible cost-cutting measure has raised alarms among voter registration organizations across North Carolina.
In late February, the State Board of Elections told county boards they would no longer provide physical voter registration forms, free of charge, to distribute to groups holding voter registration drives. Whatever county boards had in stock at the time was all they were going to get, at least for the time being.
The decision did not impact election boards’ ability to provide voter registration forms to individuals.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ Daily, Weekend and Election 2026 newsletters.]
Voter registration groups, including the League of Women Voters, You Can Vote and Democracy North Carolina, say shifting the burden of printing forms for registration drives from the state to private groups will restrict voting access — and may violate federal law.
Hayes, on the other hand, maintains that the State Board’s decision is within the letter of the law, and makes fiscal sense in a digital world.
“I’ve got to be very careful,” he said. “We’re playing with state money here, and this is the taxpayers’ money. We’ve got to be prudent stewards of those funds.”
Budgeting for voter registration
Hayes learned that the state elections board was bankrolling the printing and distribution of voter registration forms to third parties at a recent staff meeting. The printed forms were about to run out, and the board needed to decide what to do.
Hayes said it didn’t make sense to him to continue printing forms for organizations requesting hundreds or thousands at a time. The voter registration forms are on the State Board’s website; groups holding registration drives could find and print them from there.
“I mean, we do live in the information age, where things are readily available online, and these groups that conduct these registration drives are very sophisticated,” Hayes said. “A lot of them receive quite a bit of funding, so they’ve got resources to do this.”
Some groups do have the money, like the League of Women Voters of North Carolina.
LWVNC President Jennifer Rubin said it will make their finances tighter, but it’s manageable. She isn’t so sure if smaller organizations can say the same. She thinks the State Board could have absorbed the cost themselves.
In 2024, the State Board supplied nearly 1.3 million voter registration applications to voter drive organizations and government agencies that requested them, according to Jason Tyson, State Board director of external affairs.
The printing cost was more than $269,000, not including shipping costs or staff time, he said.
There’s context to that figure, according to You Can Vote Executive Director Kate Fellman. During the 2024 cycle, new parties were added and removed, the form changed multiple times and it was a major presidential year.
“But $269,000 seems like a little tiny portion of the state board’s budget for voter registration, especially when they have all these new positions that they just hired as well,” she said.
Now, the cost burden will shift to groups conducting voter registration drives. It’s not as simple as printing a regular sheet of paper, Fellman said. The North Carolina voter registration form is double-sided, on thicker paper than normal printer paper and includes color-coding.
A two-sided color copy might cost as much as $1.50 per copy, she said.
While color is recommended — the form highlights required sections in red — State Board chief of staff Brian LiVecchi said they’ll accept black-and-white forms.
In Fellman’s experience, the policy of county election boards has been to cap requests at 100 forms a day. Those limits may have been established by boards to fulfill everyone’s requests, LiVecchi said.
“The physical forms were never intended to be in endless supply,” the February email to county boards stated.
Registration Repair Project
The State Board has incurred significant costs recently as part of the Registration Repair Project, an effort to collect missing data from over 100,000 voters across the state. The project is part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice.
For a period of time, North Carolina’s voter registration form was unclear about a key requirement: registrants applying after 2004 must provide either a North Carolina driver’s license number or the last four digits of the person’s Social Security number, or otherwise check a box affirming that they don’t have either identification number.
In late 2023, the State Board of Elections fixed the form, but elections staff declined to go back and contact all voters who registered using the unclear form to collect missing identification numbers. In court, the State Board’s attorneys argued that there were enough steps to ensure voter eligibility without taking that step.
But that decision came to a head after the 2024 election, when North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin made the missing numbers the foundation of his election challenges in his bid for state Supreme Court. While the court denied his request to discard all votes from voters who lacked the required identification numbers, the DOJ pressed the issue.
As a result, the board has sent mailings to the impacted voters, which didn’t come cheap.
Hayes said it was important for the State Board to incur that cost as opposed to county boards or voters, since it was the board’s fault.
The board also recently sent letters to 241,000 voters who are not part of the Registration Repair Project, but also lack identification numbers. Many registered before 2004, when that became a required step.
The timing of the decision about printing ballots a few weeks after those mailings is “particularly concerning” to Joselle Torres, Democracy North Carolina communications manager.
“Why are there budgetary concerns when there are additional spending measures being made to inform voters of an issue that necessarily won’t impact their ability to vote and did not during the primary?” she asked.
Gone forever or just for now?
The State Board is currently working on a set of administrative rules to govern voter registration drives, addressing a number of issues staff have noticed.
First off, there’s a lot of waste, Hayes said.
“It’s my understanding that a significant number of these registration forms are never returned,” he said.
Second, there have been instances of fraudulent voter registration forms being submitted from drives with made-up information. One such case is currently under investigation, LiVecchi said.
While the rules are still in draft phase, LiVecchi said the goal is to add “guardrails” around voter registration drives.
“You have to let us know who your canvassers are,” he said. “You have to mark on the forms themselves who collected that, who in your organization, so there’s an audit trail we can get back to if we do find a problem.”
LiVecchi left the door open for a potential renewal of the board’s printing practices once those rules are in place.
Hayes didn’t completely dismiss the idea, but isn’t inclined to go back on his decision.
“It’s not my intention to go back to supplying these groups with printed forms again,” he said. “They are available on our website. They are available to counties. We do send them to individual voters.”
Is it legal?
Voting groups argue that the decision to stop providing bulk voter registrations violated the National Voter Registration Act.
The federal law requires state elections officials to make voter registration forms available for distribution, “with particular emphasis on making them available for organized voter registration programs.”
On those grounds, the State Board has a legal obligation to distribute forms, said Patrick Williamson, Fair Elections Center policy counsel.
“If the result of this decision is that community-based organizations doing this work can’t shoulder the cost burden of printing these forms and ultimately wind up unable to run community-based voter registration programs, I don’t really see how that’s not directly at odds with what federal law is requiring of the State Board,” he said.
Hayes argues that the forms are being made available.
“They’re available online,” he said. “We send them to the counties. I think we fulfill our requirement there.”
Voter registration groups have a few options if they cannot print their own forms. One option is to tell people how to vote without having them do it on the spot. Rubin said doing that creates a “missed opportunity.”
For prospective voters with a Division of Motor Vehicles ID, online registration is another option.
However, Fellman said online voter registration through the DMV is a “clunky” process, especially when trying to walk people through it at a registration drive on their mobile devices.
Plus, not everyone eligible to vote in North Carolina has a DMV ID. College students, new North Carolina residents and voters who don’t own vehicles may not have them, and rural and elderly people may not have easy access to a DMV.
“Paper forms are just the gold standard, and always have been for voter registration in North Carolina,” Fellman said. “It would be great if we had universal online access and a better designed, universal online voter registration system embedded within the State Board of Elections, but we don’t have that.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.
