Universities and Homeless Shelters: The Most Common And Suspicious NC Voter Addresses

Based on 2020 voter registration data for North Carolina, colleges and universities are by far the largest common address for voters. That might be reasonable as colleges are where lots of people live at the same address: the dormitories.

But consider Elizabeth City State University. There are over 3,000 voters registered at that school’s address across two separate locations despite the school only having a student body population of 2,261 in 2024, and, ostensibly, not all of its students live in its dormitories.

North Carolina Central University has 9,205 voters registered to its central campus address, although current student enrollment is only 7,965—likely higher than it was in 2020. Winston-Salem State University has around 6,000 registered at the school’s central address (e.g. “0 WSSU, Winston-Salem, NC”), while the school’s enrollment is only 5,200.

Duke University is a particularly large school in the tar heel state, with over 17,000 students in recent years. But most of them are graduate students who do not live on campus. Instead, there are 6,417 undergraduate students, with 85 percent living on campus. Yet 11,641 voters registered with some part of Duke’s campus as their address.

Voter registration rolls are not known for being particularly accurate. They are regularly filled with errors and voters who moved out of state or are long since deceased. Prior to every election there is a regular battle between those who want to clean up the voter rolls versus those who want to prevent legitimate voters from being accidentally purged.

In California, the size of the voter registration rolls can swing by over a million from year to year among other oddities. In 2020, somehow over 100 percent of verified North Carolina voters cast a ballot.

So, accuracy in voter registration data should be taken with a grain of salt. But the large numbers of registrants to the exact same location opens up some questions about how they were registered and how those registrants could ever vote by mail if their address is not accurate.

Impossible Home Addresses

Then there are other suspicious, common registrant locations where it would be impossible for thousands to live there. This includes non-addresses in small towns like Taylorsville or Lenoir where one-tenth of the town uses the same address with no street number or house number.

Then there are homeless shelters and substance abuse treatment facilities registering over a thousand, far beyond their potential capacity. There are also hundreds registered to job placement facilities that have no potential housing whatsoever.