Delays and late rule changes foster suspicion about the integrity of NC elections

North Carolina was the first in the country to start voting. We don’t need to be the last to finish counting.

After a 9-day wait, North Carolina was called for President Trump, yet the suspicion of the electoral process harbored by the regular person on the street is palpable – and deeply unhealthy.

Cultural elites, who rarely escape their urban bubbles, write off the sign-waving protesters as ignorant followers of a president whose days are mercifully numbered.

Such condescension is part of the reason Democrats failed so miserably this election cycle, but it also misses a key reality: The protesters have good reason for their distrust.

We’re on our fourth chair of the State Board of Elections since the judiciary handed Gov. Roy Cooper partisan control of the panel. The previous three left the board under clouds of suspicion, including for overt partisan activity, prompting a rebuke from The News & Observer editorial board.

There’s a lawsuit pending to compel production of records from a former board chair regarding the 2018 absentee ballot fraud saga.

News reports show that Cooper’s political consigliere handpicked the current director of the State Board of Elections, meaning that the governor fully controlled the administration of his own election.

And most controversially of all, the board secretly negotiated with Democratic Party super-lawyer Marc Elias to “settle” a lawsuit to rewrite the rules of the election after voting began. Legislative leaders were defendants, along with the board, in the suit filed by Elias to change election rules, yet the legislature knew nothing of the negotiations, much less a settlement agreement, until the news was made public.

How can anyone blame the person on the street for looking at this unfortunate history and suspecting that the current State Board of Elections is a partisan operation?

Add to this suspicion the information vacuum that has caused North Carolina to be one of the last states with called election results and we have a situation ripe for the types of protests we’re seeing.

The solution isn’t to malign those who distrust the process and avoid all discussion of their real concerns for fear of upsetting the status quo.

After all, we just went through nearly four years of endless questioning of the integrity of our elections process over Russian conspiracy theories which never materialized.

The solution is to unpack and illuminate what processes are driving the suspicion and to mitigate it.

Aside from rewriting election rules mid-election, one other major driver is the time delay in producing a widely agreed-upon election winner. Every day that passes without a called result just causes the distrust to metastasize.

And the information vacuum is filled with outrageous public statements from the N.C. Democratic Party a full week after Election Day, saying, “there are thousands of outstanding votes to be cast” that could sway the election result.

When the legislature returns to session, we intend to get to work on fixing this problem. We’ll start with an eye toward improving our process so that election winners can be determined as near to Election Day as possible. A nine-day post-election window, which violates state law and was agreed to in the secret settlement with Elias, is far too long.

North Carolina was the first in the country to start voting. We don’t need to be the last to finish counting.

And we’ll also take action to ensure the rules of the game can’t be changed after voting is already underway.

We hope our Democratic colleagues and the Governor will help us determine and codify a process that restores trust and confidence.

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Delays and late rule changes foster suspicion about the integrity of NC elections."