North Carolina elections take a risky turn

Yahoo

3 days ago

The new NC Board of Elections, with all members appointed by the state Auditor, are sworn in on May 7, 2025. Left to right, Jeff Carmon, Chairman Francis DeLuca, Stacy "Four" Eggers, Siohban Millen, and Robert Rucho.
Our democracy, with free and fair elections at the cornerstone, can be warped in favor of those who manipulate the election process to their advantage – who gets to vote, when and where, and which votes are included when they're finally counted. Call that a cornerstone of autocracy.
For the past 15 years in North Carolina, ever since Republicans captured majorities in the state House and Senate amid President Obama's first-term struggles, the party has sought to solidify its hold on power in just that fashion.
The tactics have been manifold: gerrymandering that puts Republicans in disproportionate numbers of safe seats. Photo ID rules that cut against groups of voters who might tend to favor Democrats. Stricter rules for absentee voting that result in some ballots being tossed because they weren't received in time, perhaps because of postal delays.
Republican legislators have been the driving force behind such changes – with elected Republican judges helpfully turning aside cries of foul from Democrats and their allies among voting-rights advocates.
All of that brings us to a chain of events triggered by last fall's elections, in which Democrat Josh Stein claimed the governor's mansion and, by a single seat in the House, Republicans lost their veto-proof legislative majority. The results apparently left Republicans in the General Assembly to vow, 'You ain't seen nothing yet!'
The counter-strategy they cooked up has panned out with what amounts to a hostile takeover of an agency that worked to advance the principles of honest, orderly elections in which every eligible citizen is encouraged to participate. That is of course the State Board of Elections – under control of the governor's party by virtue of a law dating back decades.
The takeover was set in motion when it became clear that, with Stein's victory, the board otherwise would continue with a Democratic majority. Legislators decreed that instead of by the governor, appointments to the board would be made by the state auditor – a post captured in the November balloting by Republican Dave Boliek.
In essence, the auditor would hold the reins when it came to the state's election oversight. The changeover would – and did – take effect on May 1, after Stein's court challenge was sidetracked by Republicans on the state Court of Appeals and then the state Supreme Court.
As it would happen, much water went under the bridge between the passage in December (over Stein's veto) of Senate Bill 382 and the power shift in which Boliek appointed new Republican members to run the board, and the board's nationally heralded executive director, Democratic appointee Karen Brinson Bell, was ousted.
North Carolina's political headlines throughout the end of 2024 and the first months of 2025 were dominated by the contested Supreme Court election between Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs and her challenger, Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin of the Court of Appeals.
Riggs' 734-vote victory finally was nailed down on May 5 – no thanks to Griffin's allies on the two appellate courts who agreed with him that thousands of votes shouldn't have been counted. It took a Republican-appointed federal judge to explain why disallowing those votes would have violated the constitutional rights of citizens who cast them.
Here's where the Riggs-Griffin clash and the Board of Elections saga became intertwined. The board, for reasons ultimately validated by Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, resisted the attempt to disallow votes that Griffin claimed shouldn't have been counted, even though the people who cast them, including military and overseas voters, hadn't knowingly violated any rules and there was no evidence of fraud.
If the board hadn't pushed back, insisting for example that overseas voters actually didn't need to submit copies of photo IDs, chances are that enough votes from likely Democrats would have been tossed aside that Griffin would have won the race.
Myers boiled down his thinking in everyday language: The legality of certain conduct should be assessed according to the laws in effect at the time. 'That principle will be familiar to anyone who has played a sport or board game,' he wrote. 'You establish the rules before the game. You don't change them after the game is done.'
That was the election board's point all along. Yes, it aligned with Democratic arguments. But nobody would accuse Judge Myers of carrying the Democrats' water.
While Griffin's effort to overtake Riggs worked its way through the judicial pipeline, the law transferring election oversight to the state auditor was being challenged by Stein as an infringement on his executive powers. He argued that the state constitution gives him final responsibility for seeing that the laws are faithfully carried out, and thus he needs to be able to appoint a majority on the elections board who share his commitment to elections operated in the public interest.
Other attempts by the General Assembly to horn in the powers of Stein's predecessor, Democrat Roy Cooper, were turned aside by the courts as violations of the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. In the case of S.B. 382, top lawmakers argued that since state auditors are themselves executive branch officials, the legislature's constitutional prerogative to assign duties within that branch allows them to take oversight of the elections board away from Stein and give it to Boliek.
In accord with the state's procedure for refereeing alleged constitutional violations, Stein's lawsuit was routed to a three-judge panel in Wake County Superior Court.
After a full-dress review, with briefs and oral arguments, the panel on April 23 reached a 2-1 decision that Stein's complaints were justified. Even though North Carolina parcels out various executive duties to the elected members of the Council of State, including such figures as the state treasurer and the attorney general as well as the state auditor, the panel held that under the state constitution ultimate responsibility for the appointed Board of Elections lies with the governor. The two-person majority included one Democratic judge and one Republican. A Republican judge dissented.
Republican Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and House Speaker Destin Hall appealed to the Republican-dominated state Court of Appeals. On April 30 – the day before the election board change was to take effect – a three-person panel of the court's judges sided with the legislators, meaning that the changeover could go ahead. The unanimous, unsigned ruling contained no explanation and the judges who participated weren't identified. No prizes for accountability there!
Stein filed a last-ditch appeal with the Supreme Court, where Republicans also rule the roost. With no immediate intervention by the high court, Boliek on May 1 took command of North Carolina's election machinery. Instead of a 3-2 Democratic majority with a Democratic chairman, with Boliek's appointees the elections board emerged with a 3-2 Republican majority.
The new chairman is Francis De Luca, a Republican activist who hardly has been a cheerleader for so-called same-day registration during early voting – a convenience encouraging many eligible citizens to cast their ballots. Another new member, former Republican state Sen. Robert Rucho, would belong in the Gerrymanderers Hall of Fame, were there such a dubious institution, for his work to tilt the scales in favor of Republican candidates for the legislature and Congress.
When the Supreme Court finally responded to Stein's appeal, it rejected the governor's argument that the reassignment of election oversight to the auditor should have been blocked while the appellate courts weighed the constitutional issues.
That leaves the election board's new governance structure intact while Stein pursues his case. Of course as time elapses, as Boliek proceeds to appoint new members of county election boards and as this fall's elections approach, unwinding that new structure becomes increasingly impractical.
The high court's opinion was unsigned, meaning it was supported by the five Republican justices, although Justice Richard Dietz in a concurrence criticized the Court of Appeals' opaque handling of the matter. Dissents came from the court's two Democrats – Riggs, freshly sworn back into office after her drawn-out election win, and Anita Earls.
'The voters hired Joshua Stein and David Boliek to do specific jobs, and the General Assembly is restructuring those jobs after the election,' Earls wrote. 'The General Assembly may not grab power over enforcement of election laws by shuttling the Board [of Elections] between statewide elected officials until it finds one willing to do its bidding.'
Well, that sort of power grab looks to be just what the legislature's Republican chiefs had in mind, and acceding to it looks to be just what the appellate courts are inclined to do.
Continue down that path, and they'll be turning over supervision of the state's elections to people whose 'election integrity' mantra has proven to be code for voter suppression driven by right-wing partisanship. Not only does that degrade our democratic system, but it also puts the best interests of many North Carolinians vulnerable to economic, educational, environmental and health challenges at unacceptable risk.