Strach testified Wednesday as the lawsuit seeking to overturn North Carolina’s controversial Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA) entered day 13.
After Strach described the voter registration and verification processes used by the State Board of Elections, Defense attorney Alec Peters asked her if voters in North Carolina were worried about voter fraud.
“I definitely think there is a perception that there is voter fraud,” Strach said, adding it “affects [voter’s] confidence” in election integrity.
She said small municipal elections were especially vulnerable to voter fraud, because they could be decided by only a few votes.
Strach was first hired by the State Board of Elections in 2000 as one of two investigators. By March 2015 the staff had grown to five investigators, two of whom are former FBI agents.
She said the newly-expanded staff was working on a backlog of voter fraud investigations and had recently referred 31 cases to District Attorneys in the state.
Plaintiff’s attorney Josh Kaul objected, saying Plaintiffs were never given any information about the referrals.
Peters said Defense attorneys couldn’t mention the referrals at pre-trial depositions because they were active investigations.
Judge Thomas D. Schroeder overruled Kaul’s objection.
North Carolina and Interstate Crosscheck
Strach said North Carolina participates in Interstate Crosscheck, the controversial Kansas-based program that claims to collect and merge state data to create lists of voters who are registered in more than one state.
Critics say Interstate Crosscheck produces false matches because it sorts voters only by first name, last name, date of birth and the last four digits of their social security number.
In May 2014 the elections watchdog group Democracy North Carolina issued a press release saying it had found four North Carolina legislators whose first name, last name, date of birth matched voters registered in other states.
Plaintiff’s attorney Daniel Donovan asked Strach if she thought the four lawmakers were committing fraud.
“I’d have to investigate,” she said.
