A group at the New York University School of Law says it has made a public records request to the State Board of Elections for purged voter lists to find out whether voters have been wrongly dropped from the rolls.

The Brennan Center for Justice is studying whether several states wrongly purged voters from their records, Barb Barrett reports.

The center’s investigators looking at states, including North Carolina, because they have had flawed voter purges or registration practices in the past, according to a news release from the Brennan Center.

The group says many states purge voter rolls in secret, without notifying voters.

"There really are no effective national standards to govern voter purges, and the result is a chaotic, whimsical approach to the maintenance of voter rolls," said executive director Michael Waldman.

An elections director says a recent report is bunkum.

The report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University noted in an appendix that there were problems with votes in a 2004 election in Buncombe County.

Citing an article in the alt-weekly Mountain XPress, the report says:

Touch-screen voting machines in at least two precincts did not display one of the races on the ballot. One election official estimated that the error affected at least 600 voters. Because there was no paper record, it was impossible to determine how many votes were lost.

But elections director Trena Parker said that the fault lay not with the Sequoia voting machines, but with the poll workers, who gave voters the wrong ballot, affecting a local school board race.

"There was no problem whatsoever with the machines," she said.

After using the touch-screen machines for nine years, the county replaced them when they were invalidated in 2006. Buncombe now uses optical-scan ballots from ES&S.

(Read the original post here.)

North Carolina was praised for improving election accuracy.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law and two other law schools found that a majority of states do not conduct post-election audits in a way that is helpful, with one exception:

We are aware of only one state, North Carolina, that has collected and made public the most significant data from post-election audits for the purpose of improving future elections.

The report notes that UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Public Health audited elections in detail on 2006 primary and general elections, including information on electronic tallies and recounts and the accuracy of voting machines.

Not all was well in the state, however.

An appendix noted several problems with recent North Carolina elections, including touch-screen voting machines that did not record votes in a school board race in Buncombe County and lost votes for agriculture commissioner in Carteret County, both in 2004; and problems with voting machines in Robeson and Wayne counties in 2002.

Clarification: The elections director in Buncombe County says that the problem was not with the machines, but with poll workers who set them up with the wrong ballots.

A national report on state Supreme Court races praised North Carolina.

The report looked at campaign finances of 2005-06 elections for top state judicial posts. It found that 99 percent of money for North Carolina's candidates came from state residents.

That compares favorably to Georgia, where 50 percent came from out of state.

The report also found that 53 percent of North Carolina's judicial campaign money came either from the public financing or from contributions of less than $100.

The report was done jointly by the Justice at Stake campaign and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the National Institute for Money in State Politics.