In their final weeks before they lose the ability to pass laws, Republican lawmakers gutted the powers of incoming Democratic officials and upended who runs elections.
Alex Burness | December 12, 2024
North Carolinians protest the passage of a new law that, among other changes, upends election administration in the state. (Photo by Greg Stewart.)
December 12, 2024
GOP Grabs Control of North Carolina Election Boards, Rushing to Negate November Losses
Around 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon, the North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected a bid by Republican Jefferson Griffin to toss about 60,000 votes cast in a state supreme court race he narrowly lost. Griffin had filed six different protests and on all but one the board voted on party lines: Its three Democratic members sided against him, outvoting the two Republican members.
“The importance of people being able to vote and not be disenfranchised is extraordinarily important,” Alan Hirsch, the Democratic chair of the state elections board, said Wednesday as the board shot down Griffin’s bid. “It’s a fundamental constitutional right. It’s what makes our democracy run.”
Democrats have a majority on this board because North Carolina law has, since 1901, empowered whomever is governor—at the moment, that’s Democrat Roy Cooper—to appoint all five members of the state elections board, with no more than three members per board allowed from either major party. The governor also appoints the chair of each of the 100 counties’ elections boards. In practice, this has meant that whichever party controls the governor’s office also enjoys majorities on these boards. Josh Stein, a Democrat, won the governor’s race to replace the retiring Cooper on Nov. 5, so the Democratic Party was set to retain this edge over the next four years.
Two hours after the state elections board voted, just before 5 p.m., GOP lawmakers did their best to erase that advantage and hand their party control in the future: The legislature passed Senate Bill 382, which strips the governor of his power to appoint people to state and county election boards.
SB 382 transfers that power to the incoming state auditor, Republican Dave Boliek. This means that Boliek will decide who sits on election boards instead of Stein, effectively flipping the partisan majorities on the state’s 101 election boards to the GOP through 2028.
“The voters showed their will to elect Josh Stein governor because they know what the governor does and they want him to be the guy that does that,” said Graig Meyer, a Democratic state Senator who represents Chapel Hill. “To take it away and give it to their new favorite Republican elected official is just direct disdain for the voters’ will.”
The legislature passed this bill shortly after the statewide elections held on Nov. 5, but Cooper vetoed it in late November. Republicans have supermajorities in each legislative chamber thanks to gerrymandering, and they voted, on party lines, to override the veto. The GOP rushed this reform during the lame-duck session because it is poised to lose its supermajority in the upcoming legislature.
Protesters swarmed the General Assembly as the override pended over the last two weeks, shouting from the House gallery as that chamber issued the final vote on the matter Wednesday afternoon.
SB 382 is ostensibly a Hurricane Helene relief bill, and Republican leaders often tried to sell it that way. Right before the House override vote on Wednesday, a GOP state representative, Dudley Greene, spent almost 20 minutes on the chamber floor tearfully lamenting Helene’s vast destruction—and making no case for elections changes.
But only about a dozen pages of the bill, out of 132, directly concern hurricane relief, leading Cooper to deem it a “sham.” In some moments of candor, Republicans made clear their intent: “This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket,” House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, said on Wednesday in an interview with Steve Bannon, the far-right media mogul and former Donald Trump strategist. Moore is moving up to the U.S. House in January thanks to a brand new congressional gerrymander he helped engineer.
“It’s not about hurricane relief,” Karen Ziegler, lead organizer for Democracy Out Loud, who was among those protesters shouting from the gallery at lawmakers over SB 382, told Bolts. “They really badly want this MAGA wishlist that’s in the bill, which is completely gob-smacking, and which is completely about voter suppression.”
The new law is full of major changes meant to weaken the powers of incoming Democratic officials. It removes the governor’s authority to fill judicial vacancies. It bans the attorney general—a Democrat for the next four years—from participating in any lawsuits that would unwind any action taken by the legislature. And it strips the lieutenant governor, who’ll also be a Democrat through 2028, of her role overseeing a state council on energy policy. The law also eliminates two local court seats that have been held of late by judges who have struck down GOP election laws.
This broad power grab looms particularly large over election administration. The state elections board is responsible for certifying election results, adjudicating campaign complaints (like Griffin’s) and supervising the boards of election in each of the state’s 100 counties.
The county boards also have broad authority, determining, for example, the number and location of early voting sites. When these county boards cannot reach an agreement on those plans, the state election board makes the final call.
Republicans in North Carolina have pushed to scale back early voting, and county boards in the state often disagree on how widely to make it available. They’ve split in some places on whether to set up voting on Sundays, which is a day used by many Black voters. In populous Union County, for instance, the board in 2022 sought six early voting sites across two Sundays over an alternative plan that would have enabled no Sunday voting at all. Other county boards had similar disagreements.
Recent research in North Carolina has shown that early voting is the most popular method in the state, and that restricting it would disproportionately harm people of color and suppress Democratic support. County election boards also supervise voter registration and count ballots.
In addition to shifting the partisan control of election boards, SB 382 shortens the amount of time voters have to request absentee ballots, gives counties less time to county ballots, and restricts the number of days county election systems have to reach out to voters who have cast provisional ballots and need to resolve questions about their eligibility in order to be counted. The state has allowed nine days for that operation, but the new law brings it down to three days. More than 65,000 North Carolinians—Black voters and Democrats, disproprotionately—were forced to cast provisional ballots this year, according to the Wilmington StarNews.
Jeff Loperfido, chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, warns that the new three-day deadline for ballot curing will make it harder for voters to be counted.
“Every additional barrier you put up runs the risk of disenfranchising voters,” he told Bolts. “North Carolina has a history, with Jim Crow laws and numerous cases of intentional racial discrimination related to the ballot box. These things have a legacy and impact and it puts an onus on the voter to try to do everything right to try to navigate the process.”
Loperfido also predicted that the GOP majorities on the state and county election boards would pursue other changes that restrict people’s access to voting, for instance by cutting funding to local elections departments that need resources to resolve voter issues.
“There’s a lot of leeway in election administration here, over what it costs to run elections, how clean you want your voter rolls to be, and having the ability to scrutinize more heavily when it’s advantageous to your preferred outcome is probably beneficial to your political party,” he said.
Republicans in North Carolina have tried to take power over state elections for years. In 2018, lawmakers put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot to remove the governor’s power to appoint election board members and instead hand it to the legislature, but the measure failed overwhelmingly. In 2023, the legislature passed SB 749 to require an even number of Democrats and Republicans on each elections board—a change that was likely to produce partisan gridlock and ultimately hamper voter access.
The governor sued to block that 2023 legislation, and it remains caught up in court, never having gone into effect.
Kym Meyer, an attorney who has argued before the state supreme court on past voting rights issues, predicted that SB 382, the new law that Republicans passed this week, will also wind up in court. “It will be immediately challenged,” she told Bolts. She also predicted that the lawsuit over the 2023 law will be promptly mooted. (Editor’s note: Just hours after publication of this story, Cooper and Stein, the governor-elect, filed a lawsuit against a section of SB 382 that strips the governor’s ability to appoint the head of the Highway Patrol. Litigation against other provisions may still come in the future.)
But Meyer, who is now litigation director for the Southern Environmental Law Center and who is married to Graig Meyer, the state senator, was among a half-dozen voting rights advocates who said they aren’t optimistic about what could come next in court: Republicans have a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court, which is itself, in part, a product of GOP legislative efforts to help Republicans win elections to that court. The court has followed up by blessing GOP priorities, including by blessing gerrymanders that favor Republicans electorally and restricting rights restoration for people on probation and parole. It may also end up deciding last month’s supreme court race, as Griffin’s camp has indicated it may appeal Wednesday’s rejection from the state elections board.
Several voting rights advocates specifically called out as cynical the legislature’s decision, in SB 382, to have the state auditor make board appointments. No other state auditor in the country would have the kind of power over election administration that’s outlined in SB 382. Democrats on Nov. 5 won several statewide offices besides the governorship, including attorney general and secretary of state; the auditor’s is arguably the highest-profile office that will be held by the GOP.
It’s no coincidence, said Bob Hall, the former longtime director of the voting rights organization Democracy North Carolina, that the legislature proposed this reform right after voters flipped the auditor’s office red for the first time in 15 years. It shows, he feels, that Republicans are willing to find an advantage wherever they can.
“They are picking an executive-branch position—any executive branch position—to try to sidestep the part of the constitution that seems to vest administrative duty over boards of elections to the executive branch,” Hall said. “It is extreme, and it’s very aggressive.”
Boliek, the incoming auditor, said during his campaign that he wants to investigate voter rolls and reform voting equipment in the state, echoing conservatives who have cast doubt on election integrity.
Republican state Representative Destin Hall, who is set to succeed Moore as House speaker, defended the bill as falling squarely within the legislature’s prerogatives on Wednesday, saying on the House floor, “The reality is, in this state the constitution gives this body the ability to make certain decisions, and the folks elected this body just as they did Governor-Elect Stein coming in. And that’s what we’ve done in this bill.”
It’s a reminder for voting rights advocates that Republicans will, as Speaker Moore told Steve Bannon, continue to do what they can to mold the democratic process in their favor.
Said Kym Meyer, the attorney who has argued voting rights cases in state court, “At this point they’ve come up with five or six different ways to take power. This is the latest, and if in four years there’s a new auditor and it’s a Democrat, they’ll just do something different.”