Dan Forest asks Trump administration to investigate NC Democrats over mail-in voting
President Donald Trump’s administration should launch an investigation into a proposed change in North Carolina’s vote-by-mail rules, N.C. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest said Thursday.
Forest, a Republican like Trump, wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr asking him to look into potential changes the N.C. State Board of Elections voted on earlier this week, to settle a lawsuit against the state.
“As you may be aware, liberal groups from Washington, D.C., have swarmed into North Carolina to file lawsuit after lawsuit against North Carolina, seeking to change, by judicial and executive fiat, laws that were constitutionally passed by our General Assembly,” Forest wrote to Barr.
Barr, a close Trump ally, has frequently been accused of politicizing the U.S. Department of Justice to help Trump’s re-election chances. Forest’s letter makes similar accusations, but against Democrats in North Carolina.
He said N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein, who is a Democrat, worked with the Democrat-led elections board and the liberal-leaning challengers in the lawsuit “to enact, without the consent of the legislature, wholesale changes to the absentee ballot laws of North Carolina.”
At the heart of the matter is a vote the state elections board took Tuesday, to settle a lawsuit.
The lawsuit had sought a long list of changes to election rules that liberals tend to support but conservatives tend to oppose. In exchange for the challengers in the lawsuit dropping most of their requests, state election officials agreed to change some of the rules surrounding mail-in voting.
There will be a court hearing on the proposed settlement next week, and Republicans are now fighting to make sure it doesn’t get approved. The main changes the settlement would make, if approved, are:
▪ It would be easier for voters to correct mistakes on mail-in ballots, including missing signatures.
▪ Voters could put their absentee ballots at specialized drop-boxes instead of mailing them or hand-delivering them to election officials.
▪ The cutoff for ballots to arrive after the election on Nov. 3 and still be counted would be moved from Nov. 6 to Nov. 12.
That legal settlement was approved unanimously by the five-person State Board of Elections, which has three Democrats and two Republicans.
But after the state’s top Republican legislative leaders came out strongly against the changes, the election board’s two Republican members both said they hadn’t realized the full extent of what they had voted for, and resigned from the board.
One of them blamed lawyers in Stein’s office for not giving them enough information, and Forest’s letter accuses Stein of an “attack on the integrity of North Carolina’s elections.”
N.C. Senate leader Phil Berger, a Republican from Rockingham County, said Democrats supported the lawsuit settlement because they “have repeatedly tried to enact these policies for months. They lost when the legislature rejected them almost unanimously; they lost when a federal judge rejected them; they lost when a state court rejected them..”
Stein strongly rejected such accusations, saying in a written statement to The News & Observer that “I am committed to ensuring that all eligible voters in North Carolina are confident in the knowledge that they can vote easily and safely by mail or in person — and that the candidate who wins the most votes will prevail.”
He accused Republicans of trying to create confusion and mistrust in the elections.
“This is political theater at its most destructive,” Stein said. “The Republican Party needs to start respecting democracy, instead of undermining it.”
Voting rights versus voter fraud
Forest said the settlement — if approved — will undo rules put in place after the McCrae Dowless “ballot harvesting” scandal in 2018.
“I am requesting that the Department of Justice review these actions to determine whether any federal laws may have been violated, as these actions will no doubt impact the Presidential, Senatorial,and Congressional elections in North Carolina,” Forest wrote.
Forest is running for governor against Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper this year.
His letter to Barr criticizes Cooper. It indirectly alludes to Cooper’s 2018 victory in a lawsuit that found the Republican-controlled N.C. General Assembly acted unconstitutionally when lawmakers tried to change up the elections board to take away the governor’s influence over the board. Cooper, Forest said, “fought tooth-and-nail against the Board of Elections being an independent body rather than a partisan body under his complete control.”
Cooper’s office declined to comment.
Rep. Darren Jackson, the top Democrat in the N.C. House of Representatives, said the push to stop the proposed absentee voting changes is a “tirade against voting rights.”
“This proves once again that the North Carolina Republican Party has forgone any semblance of patriotism or respect for our democracy,” Jackson said Thursday. “With 40 days until the election, they have resorted to lying and sowing distrust in our electoral process all to cling to power.”
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 5:31 PM with the headline "Dan Forest asks Trump administration to investigate NC Democrats over mail-in voting."
