The North Carolina State Board of Elections has removed hundreds of thousands of registrants from its voter rolls since last year as early voting in the state begins on Oct. 17.
On Thursday, the state’s election board announced that more than 747,000 registrants were removed from voter rolls over the last year, including nine flagged as foreign nationals, through routine voter roll maintenance that is required by federal law.
WRAL News reports:
About half of the 747,274 people removed from the voter lists are people who have recently moved or died.
Most of the rest were removed because they haven’t voted in years, and state law says that makes them ineligible to remain registered.
A small percentage were removed for various other reasons, including people recently convicted of a felony, or those who simply asked to not be a voter anymore.
Last year, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) obtained North Carolina voter roll records that showed more than 1,400 registrants had been flagged as being potential foreign nationals.
The records found that ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, election officials identified more than 10,000 registrants as potential foreign nationals.
Ultimately, more than 80 percent of the registrants in question were shown to have been naturalized American citizens, leaving over 1,400 flagged as foreign nationals — most of whom were on green cards, temporary visas, or illegal aliens on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.