NC needs independent election officials
The Republican and Democratic parties in North Carolina are at war over every aspect of our elections system. They fight tooth and nail over registering voters, assigning them to districts, counting their ballots, and everything in between.
But there is one thing about which they have long agreed: The administration of our elections should remain under the exclusive control of Republicans and Democrats without any help or participation from independent voters.
One set of numbers makes this point crystal clear. With the governor’s recent appointment of county board chairs, all 505 election board seats have been filled — five State Board of Elections members and five members of each of the 100 county boards of election.
As always, every one of those 505 officials is a registered Democrat or Republican voter. Not a single board member, state or local, is an unaffiliated, or neutral, voter.
This makes no sense.
No organized athletic event in this country is officiated by fans of the competing teams. The two sides in a lawsuit don’t get to put their representatives on the jury. And it’s not as if there is some shortage of unaffiliated voters to help run our elections.
Of the current 7 million-plus registered voters in North Carolina, 34% are unaffiliated, barely trailing the 35% who are Democrats and well ahead of the 31% registered Republican.
In Wake County, which has the highest registration, there are more unaffiliated voters than either Democrats or Republicans. But not a one of the 306,888 independents in Wake County is on the election board; the nearly 180,000 Republicans have two members.
Unaffiliated voters are also the most numerous registration in 15 other counties, including Buncombe, Cabarrus, New Hanover, and Watauga. In Mecklenburg, there are over 272,172 independents and only 162,206 Republicans.
It is also destructive of our democracy. We live in intensely partisan times. Is it any wonder that more and more citizens doubt the integrity of our elections process and election results when those elections are run by the partisans and not by more neutral parties?
More and more citizens perceive that election board members now view their role as protecting party interests rather than running fair elections. Increasingly the boards vote along party lines in deciding one-stop voting sites, voting protests, and other critical matters.
In this partisan era, wouldn’t it enhance public confidence in elections to have at least some of the officials deciding where polling places are located, what voting machines are used, whether candidates meet eligibility requirements, how to count disputed ballots, whether a protest has merit — and the dozens of other decisions critical to running an election — not owe their position to either the Democratic or Republican party?
This story was originally published August 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.