- State elections officials confirm a number of non-citizens on our state voter rolls.

State law enforcement agencies sign cooperation agreements with ICE.

And does a voter ID amendment belong in our state's constitution?

This is State Lines.

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♪ - Hello again, I'm Kelly McCullen.

Joining me today, Dawn Vaughan of the News and Observer.

Representative Phil Rubin and Representative Mike Schietzelt, both of Wake County.

There they are on your screen, and in seat four, Colin Campbell of WUNC News.

Hello everybody.

- Hey Kelly.

- Hello.

- Are we electioned out yet?

Are we just getting started, Dawn?

- We're just getting ramped up.

I'm in candidate questionnaire land for a while.

Lots more stories to write and early voting in person hasn't even started yet.

- We're finished with our candidate interviews here.

I didn't get everyone.

Not everyone wants our invitation.

Nope, not everybody wants to hang out with us, Dawn.

- What?

Shocking.

- I know, right?

A lot of news out there this week.

State law enforcement agencies are signing those cooperation agreements with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

A new state law is out, requires four state level agencies to enter those agreements by this week, October 1st, in fact.

The North Carolina Highway Patrol and 30 other state and local law enforcement agencies, mostly local county sheriff's offices and police departments, have signed on.

The new law absolutely requires the Department of Public Safety, Highway Patrol, and State Bureau of Investigation, as well as the Department of Adult Corrections, to enter agreements with ICE.

The agreements allow designated trained officers to perform specified immigration enforcement functions but under ICE supervision.

So Dawn, state law kicks in.

We'll start with you.

-Okay.

- Should have started with Colin, but I didn't.

I'm going to go with you first.

- That's all right.

I can handle it.

- We'll go to Colin next.

They're signing on, so the agencies are following state law.

- Yes.

There was a veto override from the summer.

This was kind of the -- maybe there were these two major immigration bills the past couple of years.

This was the second one.

Governor Josh Stein vetoed it.

It was overridden.

Two House members took a walk.

That's how it happened this summer.

And this was the date that everything started, where these state agencies need to cooperate with ICE.

This has been really one of Republican House Speaker Dustin Hall's, I feel like, kind of key issues, things that he's really cared about in his time since speaker.

And now we're -- I mean, the legislature's out.

They're not doing anything for a while.

They're all working on their campaigns.

But any legislation that passes, there's always an effective date, and that's why we're here on October 1st.

- Colin, I remember there was a debate a couple of years ago.

The county sheriff, especially Mecklenburg County, comes to mind, others, blue counties, if you will, weren't comfortable working with ICE.

So here comes a state law passed by Republicans.

What else has happened since then?

30 agencies just seemingly sign right on by deadline.

- Yeah, I think now cooperation with ICE has become much more of a political football, given some of the ICE actions, both here in North Carolina and across the country.

This law was sort of in the process, took forever for the Republicans to get this veto override across the line.

So when this bill first passed, we were before a lot of this stuff has happened.

And so now there's, I think, more concerns about what it's going to mean in practice when the state highway patrol is doing immigration-related checks when they pull you over for speeding.

- How would that look, Mr.

Rubin?

You're an attorney, so cop pulls me over and looks at me and can ask me if I'm a citizen?

How does this operation play out?

- Well, I am an attorney and I was a federal prosecutor.

And when I was a federal prosecutor, I handled immigration cases.

And it's really important that we prosecute violent criminals, immigrants or not.

But what's happening, and Colin, you talked about this, is a lot has changed in these encounters now.

We have seen in Minnesota, for example, United States citizens killed and no accountability for that.

We have seen, I mean, courts have found dozens of violations of the Fourth Amendment by ICE.

And we have had courts find as a factual finding that ICE lied to them, which is something when I was a federal prosecutor, you were done in your career if that ever happened.

And there has been no accountability whatsoever.

So what I'm concerned about is why would we look at that and say, yeah, let's sign our law enforcement agencies up for that, especially when we even have a study from 2018, the Cato Institute, that says these agreements don't lower crime in North Carolina.

So why are we doing this to our agencies who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution?

I'm for enforcing the law, but the Constitution is part of that.

- Representative Schietzelt, things happened in Minnesota.

I don't think they've happened in North Carolina.

Should we look outside the state to say our local law enforcement officers in our state will perform the same as they have in others in relation to ICE matters?

- Well, I think when we look at how our local law enforcement should behave, we have to remember these 287(g) agreements that they're signing with ICE and with the federal government, those aren't just a one size fits all agreement.

They're given a menu of items or of options that they can choose from.

And many, especially our state law enforcement agencies, executive agencies are choosing to sign onto the broadest type of agreement that allows them to do these things at a state highway patrol traffic check.

So I mean, the General Assembly set the general framework and the executive branch is choosing and these local agencies are choosing how they want to implement that.

- The one thing I would just say is these have happened in North Carolina.

I mean, there was the video of somebody having their window smashed out that was a US citizen.

There was a case where they drove a kid half a mile away from where they picked him up, realized he was a citizen, dumped him out of the car, threw his wallet out of the window as they were driving away.

So this is not just a Minnesota thing.

But the other thing that I will say to that is we should be having law enforcement working on keeping crime down in North Carolina.

These agreements don't make people safer.

And the question that I had for Republican colleagues is what would ICE have to do?

Like how far would this have to go before you'd say, you know what, maybe we shouldn't sign onto this.

Maybe this is unethical conduct we should not put our law enforcement with.

- I think the, again, the pushback I would have is Republicans didn't sign those agreements.

That was the... - The law requires them to.

- The law requires them to, but again, there are different levels at which they could do this.

That's true, actually.

And they've chosen these task force agreements that do more to deputize officers and train them specially in handling these sorts of immigration matters.

So that was a choice by the people who are tasked with implementing the law.

- Well, legislators, like they pass the bill, they don't execute the bill, I guess.

I mean, and the executive branch has decided to move forward with this from the legislation.

I feel like there are a lot of lawyers in government.

I feel like they looked at all the different scenarios here and considered what the risk benefit was.

- I have a hard time seeing the Stein administration going further and cooperating with ICE than they're legally obligated to, but you know, I don't know the details.

- I would encourage you to look at the 287(g) options that they have.

- Outside of immigration issues, do FBI and ICE, do they normally cooperate in the past when this wasn't such a political issue?

I don't know.

I mean, that's what I see in movies, the local police are on the scene, here comes the FBI.

I always thought you worked together.

- That's how it should work.

And that's actually one of the things we're losing with the way this ICE misconduct has been is that there's a lot of really close relationship between local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.

I worked tons of cases that may have started as a local police case and became a federal case later.

And you want that cooperation.

And in particular, ICE has not been focused on violent criminals.

And that's actually, every administration before now, they focused on violent crimes.

And those would often come with working with local law enforcement.

If you want to know where violent stuff is happening in Raleigh, you talk to RPD.

So you want RPD and ICE to have a good relationship.

- The State Auditor's Office will reopen a review of a project that would replace the existing Medicaid computer system.

The State Department of Health and Human Services, along with the North Carolina Department of Information Technology, have been overseeing the upgrades.

Upgrades were due to be completed in 2024, but now the report says it won't be completed before 2029.

So North Carolina is now paying over $600 million to a contractor to keep the existing Medicaid system functioning.

Dawn, this is really wonky, weedy stuff, but it's a big deal because remember, the state had to find a billion dollars for Medicaid expansion to stay in the budget.

- It's expensive, right?

- It was hundreds of millions on some other story about three months ago.

And I was trying to think what that was.

- Everything is hundreds of millions.

- And it's $600 million to keep an old computer running, old system running.

- So WRAL had an in-depth story on this, and from what I gathered from their reporting is that DHHS had started this process.

There was an audit under the previous audit before Boliek, and they just, it didn't end up happening.

They let it go.

Now Boliek is taking that up again and looking at it.

So we'll see how that pans out with why it's cost so much, why it's taken so long, and it's still gonna take a long time.

But I don't know how many times some new management system has been quick and easy, so I think that's part of it there.

But if the result is that this actually is done in a better way with the best use of taxpayer funds, then I would think that would be the ultimate goal of the audit.

- Kudos to WRAL News, it was a good week for them with data analysis and all that.

But Representative Schietzelt, the audits are coming after all this policy was passed during the long session.

What if Dave Boliek had simply started a little bit earlier?

Could it have changed the trajectory of how you thought about Medicaid and further reforming it or adjusting for the new world of expanded Medicaid services?

- Well certainly, I think having all the information up front would have been much easier, and I think part of the more troubling aspect of the WRAL report was that there were federal reports that this was not proceeding the way that it should be proceeding.

There was a whistleblower lawsuit that was filed.

There were a lot of issues that were emerging that weren't being made public.

And so we weren't given an opportunity to put all that information out on the table and figure out the best path forward.

And all of that's now being complicated with things like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, where now we've got to do the income verification, the work requirements.

That's gonna pass on more costs.

Meanwhile we're burning $600 million on a system that should have been replaced already.

And while I can certainly sympathize with the idea that these are complex and they take time to implement, what we're looking at right now in terms of an estimate of North Carolina being done, it's twice as long as it has taken states like Virginia and Texas to get this done.

- You know, what I would say, I was concerned about that article too, and I think we should investigate it, we should get to the bottom of it.

And we should get the facts, which we don't know.

And some of the ones that we have here that we're talking about are not what they seem from my conversations with DHHS.

For example, that $600 million is not a pure cost.

It is the cost of keeping the old system running, but you're not paying the cost of running the new system until 2029, which will cost, they don't know for sure, but about the same.

So is that a $600 million cost or is it a break even?

We'll see, right?

That's a fact that we need to know, but it's important not to say sort of casually this is gonna cost $600 million more than it would have.

- Mike, just really quickly.

- I'm gonna finish this point, and then, because this is important too.

At the same time, we need to look into what CMS has said about this, the Centers for Medicaid Services, the federal agency, which used North Carolina as an example of turning a project around, this project, in a national conference, presented North Carolina as having done a good job.

They approved the 2029 timeline, and they have said that this is working well now.

This is allegations from five years old, and the United States moved to dismiss that lawsuit because there were no grounds for it.

- Well, I think that's kind of funny that you're saying that this was used as an opportunity to turn the project around.

The problem is we shouldn't have been in this situation to begin with, but to go back to the $600 million price tag and saying, well, it's about the same if we use product A or product B, I think with all of the issues that we are having with NC TRACS right now, to spend $600 on a system that is not working versus $600 million on a system that would create better coordination between state, county, and federal authorities, I would much rather spend that $600 million on a system that works.

- Is it not working, or is it just an old computer system?

- It's an old computer system, but they're having problems in terms of coordination.

I think that was the biggest problem was you had this, you had technology guidelines that were placed, that were put out by the feds, and states adopted their own systems, and having all of these different systems that were trying to talk with the federal system, they were running into all kinds of problems in terms of administering the program.

- But this is exactly why it's important to get the facts before we speak out on it, right?

We need to get the understanding of what's working and what's not.

It is not a non-working system.

It is not a broken system versus a working one.

It's working, obviously we're upgrading it because it needs to be, but we need to get the facts.

That's why I'm supportive of an audit.

I think that's a great idea.

I think that's exactly what an auditor's office should be doing, and we should get those results, but I also think it's really important not to get too far ahead of the actual facts in this.

I think it's important for the legislature to have hearings and talk about that audit when it comes in.

That's exactly what we should do, but let's get the facts before we malign the work that folks are doing because it's really important to understand what happened here.

- I think the problem is I think that's a dodge.

Right now we are nine years into a seven-year upgrade, and when we talk about having all the facts, that was the original question here, was if we had had all this information earlier, could we have done more?

Of course we could have done more.

We could have investigated, but we can't do that when all of that is kept in the dark and kept out of the legislature's hands.

- Colin, how does politics play into this?

It's something, I'm not sure that's a kitchen table issue.

$600 million certainly is.

- The nature of how this audit was off and on is fascinating politically because it started under Beth Wood, who was a Democrat known for being fairly apolitical in some ways.

She resigns under scandal.

Governor Roy Cooper appoints Jessica Holmes to that position.

She then stops the audit.

They asked her by, WRAL asked her about why.

She said she couldn't remember.

So this audit goes away for a while.

Of course, DHHS is under the governor's administration.

You get Boliek, who is a Republican and might be a candidate for governor in the future.

He's now in charge of the auditor's office, and he restarts the audit, again, of an agency under the governor.

So there's always gonna be political elements to this, even if this audit, I think, objectively does need to be done.

- So Dawn, we have $600 million.

We have Medicaid and old computer system.

We have Governor Cooper, and now Senate candidate Cooper is-- - That's kind of everything.

- And timing.

- Should we expect to hear-- - Well, this is also, you led off with this saying that this is a very in-the-weeds thing, and I mean, that's what the state auditor should be doing, is in-the-weeds thing.

So we'll see what the results are and what the General Assembly wants to do after that.

- 2027 will be here very soon.

North Carolina State Board of Elections confirms approximately 1,600 non-citizen voters are on the state's voter rolls.

So it reports the U.S.

Supreme Court ruled states can use the Homeland Security Database called SAVE to scrub state voter rolls for such non-citizen voters.

State Elections Board spokesmen say the board has not shared any names with any local elections boards.

The state board has not tried to contact any alleged non-citizens who have been flagged.

The state board says no voter will be automatically removed from the voter rolls.

That's the setup Representative Schietzelt.

About 1,600 non-voters out of how many millions?

That's pretty low percentage, factually.

- Low percentage factually, but also when you think about the fact that we've had two Supreme Court races over the last three cycles decided by a much smaller margin.

A little over 700 votes in one instance and about 400 votes in another.

I think what it really comes down to is not whether or not it's actually gonna swing elections.

The question is whether or not we are protecting people's right to vote by allowing only those who have a right to vote to participate, rather than allowing votes to be diluted.

Now again, I think it's important to keep the context straight here.

1,599 people have been potentially identified.

None of them can be removed from the voter rolls right now because we are too close to an election.

Federal law prohibits that.

But then you move beyond that.

We have to figure out how many of those are false positives.

Texas went through this and found that about 20% of the names were false positives.

So that's a significant amount.

And then we have to implement processes to allow the board of elections to act on the ones that are actually true hits.

- Are election officials, in your opinion, are they aiming first before they fire with taking these flags and removing voters?

- Well, I'm glad they're following the law in the 90-day period before the election.

There are circumstances where they can remove.

They can't do these bulk list maintenance removals.

And I'm glad that you added the word that's really important there, which is possible non-citizen voters.

And even the state board has said it's a small fraction.

No one who's not eligible to vote should be on our voter rolls.

That's plain and simple.

But it's also, and what I want to see both sides of the aisle come to a commitment, that it's equally wrong if someone who is eligible to vote is wrongfully removed, or if they're forced to go through a lot of burden to prove something that they shouldn't have to prove because a database was inaccurate.

Back in 2016, North Carolina did a study of using the SAVE database for this and found that it was not accurate for doing these kind of assessments.

That was a Republican administration at the state board that found that.

And so I'm not surprised Texas has found 20%, but there's some really bad stories out of Texas where people were told to prove your citizenship.

They did that.

They still were not restored to the voter rolls.

That's the kind of thing that's going to make me furious if that happens here, because you're taking away someone's right to vote.

So again, clean the voter rolls when you find people that are truly non-citizens.

The other thing I'll just add is that there's not indications about numbers of people voting.

Being on the voter rolls and voting are different.

- Colin, this will poll popular people no matter who they are, if they're Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent.

This polls well to have clean voter rolls.

So process versus the appearance of high level policy.

- I mean, I think that's going to ultimately be the process.

If we come through this process and we realize that 10 people, or maybe more than that, are legitimately not on the voter rolls and they really shouldn't be because they're not a citizen, then I think that inspires confidence in the election system.

But then you have 10 people who go to the polls and try to vote and they don't realize that their voter registration was revoked and they didn't realize that they were supposed to have filed some paperwork to get it back and they don't get a chance to vote, then that impacts people's view of the election system in the other direction.

- But Dawn, in fairness to that, if that's 10 people who are inaccurately removed from the voter rolls, that's 10 newspaper articles, 10 different profile pieces.

It makes it look like a widespread problem if this happens.

- Well, that's not widespread.

Well, I mean, it depends on how that's actually parsed out.

What are the answers?

And I was looking at what the Board of Elections put out, I think in the springtime when this was coming down the pipeline and said that the question voters or people who are on the voter rolls will get to have a chance.

They're not gonna be automatically taken off that they would be able to say, no, this is like I am a legitimate voter and that sort of thing.

So we'll see how it parses out.

But it's even closer margins of races.

I think we saw with Senate Leader Phil Berger's primary, that was 23 votes.

- Next year's municipal elections in those small towns, it could be decided by like one or two votes.

- Every vote counts.

Everybody go check your voter registration now.

- I wanna touch on the North Carolina voters that you will decide if voter ID provisions should be enshrined in our state's constitution.

A very simple question you'll find on your ballot.

If you're one of the few thousand that hasn't voted yet.

State law requires photo identification for all people voting in person.

A successful constitutional amendment would add ID requirements for absentee voting.

The ballot question reads, the constitutional amendment to require all voters, not just those presenting to vote in person, to present photo identification before voting.

Does that make sense Representative Rubin?

- It's a mouthful, right?

What's really interesting is it's a mouthful that doesn't change the current law.

That's already the law.

That's the law that people will follow in this election that is coming up now.

What it would do is put it in the constitution.

Let me just say up front, I can understand why people find comfort in the idea of someone presenting an ID to vote.

I get that.

What I don't like about the amendment, aside from the fact this is already in statute, is it does not enshrine protecting that every single person who has to present an ID should be able to get one.

They should be able to get it for free and they should be able to get it without having to take a day off of work to get down to the board of elections, take a day off of childcare so that they can get to the board.

That's the only way to get the free ID, excuse me.

The only way to get the free ID is to go to the state board or the county board during business hours.

And so there are some protections in state law for exceptions and things like that, but there's also this requirement in state law.

- I'm gonna devil advocate you on this and say the reason it would go in the state constitution might be because if Democrats took over the state, Republicans fear you would repeal voter ID.

- Well, I think, understand my point here.

If this amendment enshrined the protection that everyone is entitled as a constitutional right to a free ID, I would have a different view of the amendment.

My problem isn't requiring it to be sort of across the board.

My problem is where is the protection?

And it is a very real fact.

All five of us sitting at this table drove here.

We have driver's licenses, presenting an ID is just not that hard.

There are a lot of people in North Carolina for whom that is actually a burden on voting.

And so if you're serious about voter ID, be equally serious that the government has an affirmative obligation to put that ID in their hands.

And if the former goes in the constitution, the latter does too.

- Representative Schietzelt, that's a point if you're gonna force the photo ID, does the state have an obligation to help citizens who might would struggle to have one get one?

- Well, I think we are helping them.

And I guess I could concede the point that, I guess I understand Representative Rubin's point that he'd wanna see that protection enshrined in the constitution too.

But I mean, we have other constitutional rights that require an ID.

You have to present an ID to go purchase your firearm and exercise your second amendment right to bear arms.

We don't have a constitutional protection for an ID for those people who wish to exercise that constitutional rights.

I mean, I guess if we're gonna do that for somebody's right to exercise a constitutional right, let's do it for all of them, not just for this one.

- I remember in voter ID, what was that, over a decade ago now?

I don't think I was even covering state politics the first time the voter ID amendment was on ballots.

But I do remember, I was a reporter then though, and I remember a lot of local groups, a lot of community groups saying that this was the different voter ID amendment about making sure that people have some sort of identification if they don't have a driver's license.

So there has been several years of being able to push options to do this, as opposed to when this first came up on ballots and there was some panic of how do you make sure people who don't have a driver's license have a way to have these IDs.

- I wanna stress that this is talking about voting by mail, which is a little bit different process.

So essentially, if you're sitting at home doing your mail-in ballot, you're gonna have to figure out a way to get a copy of your driver's license.

If you don't have a photocopier at home, that might be a bit of a challenge.

And then you don't have the verification.

When I go to the polls, they look at my photo ID and look at my face and see that that's the same guy.

When you're voting by mail, historically the verification has been you have a witness signature who says, "Yes, I see that Phil Rubin is filling out this ballot and it's really him."

When you put in a photocopy, it's maybe a little bit less of a verification point than when I'm looking at your face and saying, "This is the same guy that's on the photo ID."

- Let's go, yeah.

- And just to add, I think that's why so few states require that on the mail-in ballot because there's also not data showing that this is a problem that needs solving.

But again, I understand why people want that.

I'm just always concerned with voter access and you make a good point, right?

If you don't have a copying machine at home, it just got harder.

- Why roll this particular amendment in this cycle when you have the income tax cap, the property tax cap, it seems has gotten a lot more attention as issues as opposed to photo ID.

This seems to be the third of three amendment requests.

- Well, I think there's been a lot of debate and discussion around how we can further secure and, again, going back to what we said earlier, making sure that all lawful votes count and they aren't diluted by unlawful votes.

This is a concern that a lot of people have and so put it on the ballot and let them discuss it.

- In your opinion as a legislator on the majority side, how close is this state to having the election integrity measures in place, whether it's the auditor running elections, the elections board process, to getting it right where we can move on and put this into the rear view mirror of North Carolina history as opposed to something to raise money and to generate turnout against it?

- Well, I think that this is, when you go back and you look historically at election, the election process is going to continuously evolve.

And so security is a continuously evolving process that we need to look at seriously.

Now, does that mean we need to have an amendment every single cycle?

Absolutely not.

God, I hope not.

But this is something that requires constant vigilance.

- And the thing is, so far it does seem like we have an amendment every cycle, but more than that, where are the election access bills?

This was my point on House Bill 958.

It's all about the sort of, we need to scrub the voter rolls, we need to go after the voters.

And what I wanna see is the bill that says, how are we going to make sure that every eligible voter can vote and that they're not hampered in ways like not having a copying machine at home or not being able to get to the board of elections.

Let's work on that.

- Dawn, looking at the language, this is the third of three weeks we've covered the amendments.

I will say this about whoever wrote the ballot language.

It does seem clear on all three amendments.

It's easy to understand.

It's one or two sentences where other states have had sort of a word salad for an amendment referenda that has fooled people, in fact.

- The amendments, isn't it Paul Coble, doesn't he write the amendments?

Or correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like as far as like the exact language and what they had with that legislation.

- It used to be like a commission that would decide the exact language, but it's very small.

All these amendments you have to flip to the back of your ballot.

So I think there's gonna be a lot of drop off if people don't even realize there are three amendments and they're on the back page of your ballot.

- They're very short compared to, like I'm a Wake County voter and you look at the sample ballot of explaining the bonds, that's a lot more text.

But the two tax amendments are just very, it's one sentence, it's very short.

So I don't know if there are limits on how much explaining you can do.

- When it comes to Wake County bonds, voters do read all the language.

- Oh I read them.

- Because they'll beat the bond.

- There's a lot in there about property taxes.

- All right, that's the show for this week.

What are your thoughts folks?

Send us an email at statelines@pbsnc.org.

I'll read it, I'll share it with the panel.

Thank you folks for being on.

More importantly, thank you for watching.

See you next time.

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