NC Newsline – Requiring people who register to vote to reveal their full Social Security numbers, as North Carolina legislators have proposed, would violate a 50-year-old federal law, election and privacy experts told NC Newsline.
The requirement that voter applicants supply all nine digits of Social Security numbers to register is in the latest version of House bill 958, a sweeping bill on election changes moving through the House.
The federal Privacy Act of 1974 “makes it unlawful for any local or state government or the federal government to deny a right, privilege, or benefit because a person refuses to provide his or her Social Security number,” according to a 2023 report on Congress prepared by the Congressional Research Service. Under this federal law, North Carolina cannot deny voting rights to people who do not supply the full number.
North Carolina “can’t carve out a new exception for itself in 2025,” John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said in an email. He continued: “That’s for good reason: States have other ways to verify a voter’s identity that are far less hazardous to privacy, including driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of a registrant’s Social Security number.”
Existing law requires applicants supply one of those identifiers.
At a July committee meeting on the bill, Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Guilford) warned that the Social Security provision violated federal privacy law.
In response, Rep. Hugh Blackwell (R-Burke) and Rep. Sarah Stevens (R-Surry), the bill’s sponsors, mentioned that the applicants for social welfare programs supply full Social Security numbers and the DMV requires them.
A federal law from 1976 allows state and local tax agencies, social welfare offices, and DMVs to require Social Security numbers.
In an interview last week, Blackwell would not offer a reason why full Social Security should be required of people registering to vote.
Blackwell called the bill “a work in progress” and said the best time for him to offer a justification is when legislators have a “finished product.”
More research is going into determining “if there are federal, constitutional, or other issues we need to factor into the decision,” he said.
The bill has moved through two House committees and is next slated for a hearing in the House Rules Committee. No date has been set for that meeting.
Five states are allowed to ask for full Social Security numbers because they were grandfathered in before 1974, Lata Nott, director of Voting Rights Policy at the Campaign Legal Center said in an interview.
However, only two of those five — Virginia and Tennessee — make supplying the full number a registration requirement.
South Carolina makes it optional. New Mexico is permitted to ask for the full number, but doesn’t.
Kentucky requires it, but that state’s registration instructions say, “No person shall be denied the right to register because of failure to include social security number.”
Two Georgia voters won a federal lawsuit against Georgia filed in 2000 over the requirement that they provide their Social Security numbers as part of their voter registration. Georgia makes providing the full number optional.
If North Carolina legislators push forward with seeking full Social Security numbers, the state would need to have the Election Assistance Commission, which develops the national voter registration form, change the state-specific instructions for North Carolina, said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Legal hurdles to requesting Social Security numbers are in place to make sure states don’t collect the numbers unless they need them and to ensure “they have the infrastructure to make sure it’s done right,” he said.
Republican legislators’ interest in securing full Social Security numbers on voter forms comes as the Trump administration has dialed back its support for election security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ended support for election security and a partnership states had relied on, Votebeat has reported.
Last week, Arizona’s two U.S. Senators sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking what security help the agency would provide in light of the hacking attack into that state’s election website that changed candidate profile pictures to one of Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Votebeat reported.
At the last North Carolina House committee meeting on the bill, voters protested the Social Security number requirement, saying it would create another potential source for leaks of private data.
“While the clean voter rolls is a policy interest, so is keeping this very personal information secure, Nott said.
The executive director of You Can Vote, a nonprofit organization that sponsors voter registration drives, told the committee that potential voters would be reluctant to put their full Social Security numbers on forms they would then hand to people they don’t know.
Common Cause of North Carolina opposes the provision requiring full Social Security numbers, said Bob Phillips, the organization’s executive director.
“It is a huge identity theft risk,” he said in an interview. “There seems to be no valid reason to do it other than to put up another barrier” to voter registration.
“North Carolina has a sad legacy of making voting and registration harder,” he said.
Phillips said he was encouraged that Blackwell indicated that committee members were willing to listen to concerns about the bill.
“I hope this is not set in stone, that they actually will listen to reason,” Phillips said. “I don’t think it provides any additional security.”
