RALEIGH — A joint consent agreement to end a 2024 lawsuit over incomplete vote registrations in North Carolina was filed last Monday in federal court.
The agreement will give more than 73,000 North Carolina voters additional time to update their registration information to stay on the state’s active voter rolls. Voters casting provisional ballots in federal races will have that ballot count, but verification or curing of missing data is required before state and local ballots can be counted.
The parties involved in the lawsuit and agreement include the Republican National Committee (RNC), the North Carolina Republican Party, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE).
Both the RNC and DNC claimed the settlement as a victory.
“The parties’ agreement to enter into a consent judgment is a major win for election integrity and a clear rebuke of Democrats who tried to weaken basic safeguards,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement.
“For too long, North Carolina’s State Board of Elections failed to meet basic safeguards that protect our elections. … The RNC will always fight to ensure our election laws are clear, fair, and consistently enforced.”
In a statement, DNC Chair Ken Martin said, “We have been fighting like hell to protect the sacred right to vote — and we will never back down.
“This latest victory is a win for Americans and yet another blow to the Republicans’ scheme to disenfranchise voters ahead of the midterm elections.”
The lawsuit, brought by Republicans against the NCSBE in August 2024, alleged more than 225,000 voter registration forms were violating state law because they did not have the required identification information (a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number) mandated by the Help America Vote Act.
The 2024 complaint also alleged the NCSBE did nothing to address the issue before the 2024 general election, after which the voters in question became part of the fight over the results of the N.C. Supreme Court race between Associate Justice Allison Riggs and Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin. Riggs was eventually certified as the winner after a protracted legal battle.
In May 2025, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice sued the NCSBE over the same issue. In response, the newly Republican-led NCSBE laid out a plan to fix the issue through a voter registration repair program.
According to the agreement’s details, the NCSBE’s Registration Repair Project is to continue, noting that since it began operating in July 2025, “the total number of voters missing this information has decreased from 103,329 to 73,064,” as of Dec. 11, 2025.
The NCSBE’s Voter Repair Project must publish and update a daily public list of affected “subject voters” on its website and in the voter database, per the agreement. The NCSBE must also mail notices to subject voters, accept submissions per project rules and input verified data within 10 days or within five days if received near an election date.
According to the consent agreement, which includes numerous stipulations, those voters impacted would be able to correct their registration when they vote. Those missing information can vote provisionally and use a checkbox to denote their registration needs repairing.
Additionally, the NCSBE is ordered to stop accepting or processing new voter registrations lacking a driver’s license number or last four digits of a Social Security number while attempting to obtain the missing data under state law.
Chief Judge Richard Meyers of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina will need to approve the agreement. Meyers had remanded the part of the 2024 lawsuit involving overseas voting back to state court in October 2024.
In the past week, Republicans also dropped their appeals to the N.C. Supreme Court in a pair of cases linked to the Riggs-Griffin race (Kivett v. NCSBE 1 and 2), a likely sign another settlement agreement may be forthcoming.
Voters who have received notice that their registration needs repairing can visit the NCSBE’s Registration Repair website at ncsbe.gov/registrationrepair.
