In light of the upcoming presidential election, states across America have been cleaning up their voter rolls to ensure election integrity is upheld. It would seem North Carolina is the latest to do so after purging 747,000 ineligible voters in the last 20 months.

The announcement from the State Board of Elections in North Carolina came shortly after officials from Oklahoma announced 453,000 ineligible voters had been removed from their voter rolls since 2021, as well as Texas, which removed roughly one million people over the course of three years. In the case of North Carolina, the ineligible voters included 130,000 people who had passed away, along with those who had moved out of the state, were convicted of a felony, had a duplicate registration, were noncitizens, or where ineligible for other reasons.

As states continue to clean up their voter rolls, experts say the effort is extremely important to increase the integrity of elections. Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, remarked on Friday’s edition of “Washington Watch” that what North Carolina did “is great.”

“In fact,” he continued, “election officials should be commended for doing … what they’re required to do under two separate federal statutes, which is maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls.” Evidently, “the 747,000 individuals they removed over the past year and a half are all folks who should not be on the rolls.” And Spakovsky emphasized that not only are these removals “a good thing,” but that “other states should all be following this example and doing exactly the same thing.”

Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm, guest host of Friday’s episode, asked, when names are left “dormant” on voter rolls, does it lead to “a situation where ballots are being mailed out in these persons names?” In other words, if the names were not removed, would “dead people … be receiving ballots?” According to Spakovsky, “North Carolina is not one of the states that has moved to mailing out ballots to every single voter” — which he described as a “very, very bad practice.” However, he noted, that is “what they now do in Nevada.”

Addressing Backholm’s question, Spakovsky said that it is possible for the names of ineligible voters to be used if they’re not removed from the roll as “federal law requires,” which is why “it’s a good thing to take those names off” to eliminate that risk. Especially when considering, as Backholm raised, if “there were [over] 700,000 names on the voter rolls that shouldn’t have been,” it’s likely removing those names could make “a difference in the upcoming election.” Spakovsky agreed, saying “it could definitely make a difference.”

To illustrate this, Spakovsky noted past instances in which election results saw very close margins. “Consider the fact that in 2008,” he said, “Barack Obama won the state of North Carolina by only 14,000 votes. That’s a very small number.” And in the 2020 election in Georgia, “Donald Trump lost by only a little over 10,000 votes.” Ultimately, election results are often very narrow, meaning that “names that could be used by people who want to cheat can [easily] make a difference.”

And with mail-in ballots particularly, Spakovsky warned against “absentee ballot fraud,” emphasizing how widespread it is. He elaborated that mail-in ballots are “the only kind of ballots that are voted outside the supervision of election officials and outside the observation of poll watchers.” Considering this, at least as a first step, “States need … to secure and increase the integrity of those” voting by enforcing voter ID laws, he argued.

Ultimately, Backholm concluded, “[I]t’s not difficult to understand why” North Carolina and other states having thousands of ineligible voters on their rolls “would be a problem, and therefore, it’s not difficult to understand why we should prevent that from happening.”