Hello. I am sending this information anonymously in order to protect myself and my family.
I work for the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles. The whole DMV has been in a panic mode ever since the information came out about the missing voter registrations. I believe I know why because yesterday I uncovered evidence that people in the office of the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles in Raleigh caused the voter registration failures in just specific locations. It looks like it was not an accident and the person who led the registration failures looks to have been promoted for her work in this mess.
I have reason to fear retaliation if this information were to be linked back to me. I am sending this email to inform you of how this information can be gotten through freedom of information requests. I believe someone needs to get this quickly because already the DMV is ordering faster shredding of certain paper documents since the election.
Here are the details.
Starting back in February of 2016 the drivers license examiners in the DMV offices throughout the Charlotte area began reporting problems with the recording of new voter registrations. People in the primary elections began coming into these offices to complain that they did not get to vote because they were told they were not on the list of voters. I did not put the puzzle together until this information just came out about these missing registrations and suddenly there was so much panic from the Commissioners people this week.
The process happens as follows. Each examiner is told to have each customer sign paperwork indicating whether he or she is registering to vote or declining to register. The forms that are declined are filed right there in that office. However the forms that are for new voter registration are scanned into a system to be uploaded directly to Raleigh through a fancy fax machine.
In the Charlotte area these machines started giving an error message in February of 2016 when registrations were trying to be uploaded. The error message was “SYSTEM ERROR, CONTACT ADMINISTRATOR.” Examiners and supervisors from every office experiencing this problem contacted Tracy Bucholtz who was the Acting Director of DMV Programs and Liaison to the Board of Elections. Tracy Bucholtz repeatedly responded to these error warnings by stating that the registrations were still going through, and that the offices should continue to scan the documents nightly and to disregard the error message. Tracy Bucholtz reported directly to Commissioner Kelly Thomas who was appointed by Pat McCrory and she also appears to have been recently promoted just after the election. All of this is most suspicious now that we have just learned about all of the missing registrations.
We now know these registrations did not go through the upload because there was a real system error just as the machine said. We also know that Tracy Bucholtz had to know this because the numbers would not have matched in her databases but she said nothing was wrong. We learned this week this is untrue.
I have confirmed with several good DMV examiners in the Republican voting areas outside of Charlotte that this error message never occurred on their machines. I have confirmed that this error message did occur on the machines of many offices in the areas that are most upset about the new toll lanes on Interstate 77 and losing the basketball events. This is in Mecklenburg County and the Iredell County communities around the toll lanes.
Furthermore this error message ceased the week after the registration deadline for the November election. Poof. Suddenly no more error messages anywhere but now we are to shred more local documents after 30 days when it used to be 90 days. This was moved up just recently and the enforcement is suddenly strict.
Here are the items to get with a freedom of information request that will show how all of this happened and how the DMV commissioners office was part of it.
- Pull the freedom of information records for all of Tracy Bucholtz emails from February of 2016 to the election and you will see all of her claims of “no problems” when we now know there were many problems. You will be able to track all of the office supervisors and examiners who were giving her the information about the error messages and the forms not uploading to Raleigh. You will see it was happening at only specific offices and not everywhere in the state.
- Request all of the data logs from the DMV Issuance System from those same months. Records in this system will show how many affirmative voter registrations each individual examiner had at each DMV office. There will be much specific information in these records.
- Request all of the records in the central database where the affirmative voter registrations are supposed to be processed over to the Board of Elections for final registration. You may wish to request this from the board of elections side as well.
If you do these things you will be able to track the missing registrations and see that there is no way Tracy Bulcholtz did not know the numbers did not match. The issuance system numbers will not match the central database numbers or records of what the board of elections received from DMV. You will see which DMV offices had missing registrations and which did not. From everything I have seen I feel most certain you will find the missing registrations come from areas where Pat McCrory had people who were most angry with him as Governor.
I just feel sick over all this corruption. We did not realize how big this was with the voter registrations until this information was just released about thousands of DMV voters not able to vote. We did not know we were being used to hurt voters. Many examiners have looked back at the old emails about this problem and have connected the dots but everybody is scared. We need an outside person to connect the dots.
ここには何もないようです