Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Justice have gotten a court order for North Carolina to turn over eight years of voter registration records from the state.
The North Carolina board of elections made the subpoena public as part of the materials for a public meeting it is holding Friday, where the request will be considered.
There is little context provided for the request, which is only listed by the board as "Consideration of subpoenas issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement via the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina."
The subpoena asks the state records office to provide "any and all voter registration applications and/or other documents, as identified below, that were submitted to, filed by, received by, or maintained by the North Carolina State Board of Elections from January 1, 2010, through August 30, 2018, within any of the counties in North Carolina."
The list of documents include voter registration forms, absentee ballots, early voting application forms, provisional voting forms, "Admission or Denial of Non-Citizen Return" forms and voter cancellation or revocation forms.
A separate subpoena issued to Pitt County requests poll books, voting records, voting authorization documents and "executed official ballots," including absentees, from August 30, 2013 through August 30, 2018.
A federal law enforcement official confirmed the request is related to indictments announced in late August, when the Department of Justice and ICE announced they had charged 19 foreign nationals with voting illegally.
That press release noted, "The indictments follow an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) as part of a newly created Document and Benefit Fraud Task Force (DBFTF) in the Eastern District of North Carolina."