The Waynesboro City Council candidate who spends the bulk of his time and energy on North Carolina politics has something to say about the reports that the state has removed 747,000 voters from the voter rolls there.
Dave Goetze, the Republican nominee in our Ward A race in Waynesboro, and the vice president and director of research at the Wake Forest, N.C.,-based Electoral Education Foundation, thinks the actual number of voters removed from the rolls is actually much lower.
According to a post that Goetze made to his Major Dave Facebook page, his research shows that the number of inactive voters in North Carolina since the beginning of 2023 has increased by 32,412, and the number of removed voters has increased by 231,620.
“That’s a lot, but nowhere near 747,000, and even less if many of those inactives were simply changed to removed status,” Goetze wrote. “Were there half a million removed voters now redacted from the weekly file because they had had no contact or activity in the last decade as the NCSBE had told me is their policy? Perhaps.”
ICYMI
The 747,000 number reported by the North Carolina State Board of Elections as having been removed obviously made national news, in a state that is a key battleground in the 2024 presidential election.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, according to the recent polling, are in a virtual dead heat in North Carolina, which has gone to Trump in each of the past two cycles, though his win in the state in 2020 over Joe Biden was razor-thin, by 1.3 points.
Trump absolutely needs North Carolina on his map to get to 270 electoral votes, though that task might be more difficult with the controversy surrounding the Republican nominee in the governor’s race, Mark Robinson, who was heartily endorsed by Trump earlier this year.
Robinson, already down double-digits in his race with Democratic nominee Josh Stein, has lost several top staffers and the financial support of the Republican Governors Association in the wake of reporting about comments that he made on a porn site more than a decade ago, including a declaration that he considers himself a “black NAZI,” that he supports slavery, and admits to a wide range of sex kink interests and activities.
A key part of the Republican strategy in states like North Carolina in the Trump era has been to focus on shrinking the voter rolls, the thinking behind that being, we know we can’t win majorities in the electorate as it is currently constituted, but we have a shot if the lines on the playing field are made artificially tighter.
In line with this strategy, Texas, for instance, last month announced that it had removed more than 1.1 million voters from its rolls, and had placed another 2.1 million on a suspended list, making up 13 percent of the state’s 17.9 million registered voters.
The 747,000 number that North Carolina election officials said Thursday had been removed would represent 8.8 percent of the total that would have been on the rolls before the removal process.
Which gets us back to our guy in Waynesboro, who still doesn’t seem to be actively campaigning for the City Council seat here, maybe because he’s so busy keeping tabs on North Carolina.
He has the voter purge in North Carolina closer to 264,000 than the 747,000 that is being reported.
That’s still a significant number of voters in a state that Trump won by 74,000 votes in 2020.
But, would it be enough to push Trump across the finish line, and give Robinson a puncher’s chance in the race with Stein?
Never fear: Major Dave is here.
“This isn’t about fancy algorithms or numerical theories. I can put a voter’s name and record with every one of these numbers if need be because those counts shown were taken from those by-name rosters,” Goetze wrote on his Facebook post.
“I will be making inquiries through the Legislature to find out where the other half a million voters went they claim to have purged if my findings for 2023 do not reveal them,” Goetze wrote.
Share
Chris Graham
