The North Carolina State Board of Elections’ voter registration search tool appears to be down, days before elections in some cities and towns.
When searching for voter records, an error appears with a message saying “The web function you were interacting with has encountered an error,” with a message saying to send an email to the SBOE’s help page for assistance.
The North Carolina Democratic Party said on X that it heard the tool was down in 94 of the state’s 100 counties, adding that it is “impacting poll workers’ ability to quickly identify and register votes.”
Election day is on Tuesday, Nov. 4, for general elections and runoffs for various municipalities, including Durham and Fayetteville.
It is unclear how many counties are affected by the outage. While it is unclear what caused the outage, Clayton blamed the state’s Republican Party.
“When Dave Boliek first took over the Board of Elections he removed career election professionals to fill his leadership with inexperienced, partisan appointees,” said Anderson Clayton, head of the North Carolina Democratic Party, in a statement provided to WRAL News.
“Now, on the last day of early voting before our municipal elections, the NCSBE Voter Search tool went down in 94 out of 100 counties.”
Boliek, a Republican, was given authority over the elections board after Republican state lawmakers changed state law following the 2024 elections to shift control of elections from the governor to the auditor. The change came days after Democrat Josh Stein won the race for governor and Boliek won the race for state auditor.
“It’s clear that Republicans were wrong when they said that making Boliek the only State Auditor in the country that controls elections would not impact voting or the quality of our systems, ” Clayton said.
WRAL News has asked the NCGOP to confirm if they are aware of the issue, and also reached out to the State Board of Elections to confirm the outage’s severity.