Featured photo: NC State Legislative Building in Raleigh. (photo by Jayron32 of English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
North Carolina Republicans may be on the precipice of losing their legislative supermajority, pending election protests, but in one of their final veto-proof acts, they’re attempting to lock in elections appointment power for their party far beyond this election.
During its November session, the General Assembly passed a third Helene recovery bill, Senate Bill 382. It moves, but does not appropriate, $227 million from North Carolina’s reserve fund to the Helene Fund. The funds will not be spent until further action by the legislature.
The 131-page bill also includes various election changes, like shifting election board appointment power from Democratic Governor-Elect Josh Stein to incoming Republican auditor Dave Boliek.
Under current law, the State Board of Elections and county boards of election include two members from the Democratic and Republican parties, with the governor appointing the final member. It if becomes law, any expected appointment from Boliek would flip the partisan balance, and give Republicans a majority on each board.
The bill also moves forward deadlines for requesting absentee ballots, fixing voter registrations, absentee and provisional ballots with curable deficiencies, and completing the counting of ballots. Elections administrators have said the deadlines in the bill would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to meet.
Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, calling it a “sham” that didn’t send any actual money to Western North Carolina.
“This legislation was titled disaster relief but instead violates the Constitution by taking appointments away from the next Governor for the Board of Elections, Utilities Commission and Commander of the NC Highway Patrol, letting political parties choose appellate judges and interfering with the Attorney General’s ability to advocate for lower electric bills for consumers,” he wrote in his veto message.
Monday, the Senate overrode Cooper’s veto. The House will meet later this month to vote on an override. During the first vote on the bill, three House Republicans in the Helene-impacted region voted against the bill. None have indicated how they’ll vote on the veto override, although their votes would now be necessary to override the governor’s veto of the appointment shift bill.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger said he’s “confident the House will have the votes.”
No state senator stood to debate the veto override, but North Carolinians watching from the Senate gallery were not as quiet. They applauded after the reading of Cooper’s veto override message and objected to the veto override, yelling “It’s voter suppression!” and “It has no reasonable relief for hurricane victims!”
For the second time in as many sessions, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson quickly called for legislative police to clear the Senate gallery. Even after being kicked out of the Senate chamber, protesters continued chanting “shame” and held “NO 382” signs against the gallery’s glass barrier.
“Unfortunately, it’s couched as a disaster relief bill, but it’s anything but,” one protester, Janie Mac, said outside the gallery. “It’s more of a disaster bill actually — a disaster for our legislature and for our government, and what roles and responsibilities and rights the incoming governor is going to have.”
Melinda Douglas also objected to the bill’s coupling of disaster relief with other, unrelated provisions like the election boards appointment measure. She said the disaster recovery was “just an excuse on their part to do this.”
While Cassandra Norris recently got politically involved, she doesn’t think the bill seems like a “well-thought-out plan.” She also doesn’t think most voters know what the legislature is up to.
“I was looking up for any sort of information on this,” she said. “I could not find it. I did not see it on tiktok. I did not see it on social media. I had to dig.”
Brigette Rasberry questioned what the motivations behind the bill were, if not to overturn the will of the people, “because the people voted and they voted for who they wanted in those positions.”
Berger previously told Carolina Public Press that he didn’t think many voters made their decision to vote for Stein based on who would have the power of appointment for members of election boards.
“What they would be more interested in is the elections process being properly administered without consideration of politics,” he said. “And I don’t think anybody can objectively look at how the Board of Elections over the past probably seven plus years has functioned in a manner that is free from suspicion of partisan influence.”
The bill as a whole only takes appointment power from recently elected Democrats and gives it to recently elected Republicans, North Carolina ACLU director of policy and advocacy Liz Barber said.
“I think it’s really disingenuous to suggest that this is making anything less partisan,” she said.
Rasberry said this legislative process shows why people need to be more politically engaged, whether they like politics or not.
“If more people were engaged, aware of what was going on, this would not have happened in this chamber today,” she said.
“We have to be vigilant to make sure that our power is wielded and is heard, and that these people who have been elected to represent us represent our interests, not a party interest, not their personal interest, but the interest of the people who elected them.”
The changes in appointment power are not the only election-related issue causing concern about the bill.
Alamance County Board of Elections member Noah Read was one of the gallery watchers. In his county, he said they have six full-time elections staff. Despite enlisting the help of other county departments to help prepare for their county canvass, they still had people working until 9 p.m. to finish the job.
Under current law, counties have until the canvass, 10 days after the election, to count absentee and provisional ballots and fix any curable deficiencies of absentee ballots, provisional ballots or voter registrations. The proposed bill would give county elections staff three days to do the same job.
Read said those deadlines are not feasible.
“It would be impossible to do in the amount of time they’re trying to give us,” he said. “It’s already almost impossible, so a third of the time? Totally impossible.”
Brunswick County Elections Director Sara LaVere sent a letter to all lawmakers after Cooper’s veto expressing this impossibility and asking them to reconsider their votes.
As the executive director of the North Carolina Association of Director of Elections, LaVere said there needs to be more dialogue with actual elections administrators about the goals of the legislation. She doesn’t believe any were contacted during the drafting of the bill.
“When you get into the nitty gritty of how elections work, it is very difficult for someone who doesn’t actually do the work to understand the implications of some of these changes and the logistics of how difficult it would be to meet some of these new compressed timelines,” LaVere said.
“I mean, some of them, I really wonder if they would even be feasible if we worked 24 hours a day around the clock from Election Day to get them done. And when you start working those extended hours, that’s when mistakes happen.”
For example, Brunswick County had over 1,000 provisional ballots. Elections officials had to research each one, place them into categories and double check against their software records. It’s “cumbersome and meticulous work,” LaVere said. Provisional voting is a requirement of the federal Help America Vote Act.
After Monday’s veto override, Berger said he “disagrees” with county elections officials who say the new deadlines are not possible to meet.
“So my understanding is we have states that are larger than North Carolina that have the ability to count their ballots election night, and yet we seem not to be able to do it,” he said. “Many weeks post-election, we still have a number of elections that haven’t been certified.”
LaVere said it’s an “apples to oranges” comparison, since the way elections are run differently in each state — including different voting equipment, methods and legal requirements — may make one state’s process impossible in another.
“A more productive approach would be for lawmakers to engage directly with North Carolina’s election officials, who can provide detailed insights into the challenges we face and practical solutions tailored to our state’s systems and laws,” she said.
“By working together, we can ensure timely results while maintaining the accuracy and integrity that voters expect and deserve.”
If the House also overrides the veto, Barber doesn’t think next year’s session will bring any relief. She doesn’t anticipate the legislature repealing the bill, and any tweaks they could make to mitigate the harm would be mere “small steps.”
“In recent years, we’ve only seen the General Assembly move in one direction when it comes to voting rights, and that’s making it harder to vote,” she said. “So it isn’t terribly promising that they would do anything to ease back from that.”
However, even if the House overrides the veto, the measure could face a court challenge. The North Carolina chapter of the ACLU is evaluating the constitutionality of several provisions of the bill, Barber said.
North Carolina elections directors have left their jobs in droves in recent years; a CPP investigation tied much of the turnover to low pay and a dearth of resources. This election, nearly a third of county elections directors were overseeing their first presidential election.
LaVere said the election put a “huge strain” on county elections staff. Elections work has involved a lot of hours and manual work recently, since the state election management system software is too outdated to handle many of the new legally required processes.
The increased pressure from the proposed bill risks exacerbating the turnover trend, LaVere said.
“A lot of us are just tired,” she said. “It’s definitely … going to have people thinking, ‘Am I close enough to retirement?’”
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