Yet another bad bill proves NC Republicans just can’t leave elections alone | Opinion
North Carolina Republicans have — yet again — introduced a bill that could further change the way elections are administered across the state.
It’s a sneaky bill introduced through sneaky tactics. Republicans released the bill late at night and pushed it through a committee hearing the next morning without opportunity for public comment. Perhaps that’s because they didn’t want to hear what the public would have to say about a bill that would shape elections in their partisan image.
The most significant of the bill’s provisions would allow more than a third of nonpartisan staff at the State Board of Elections to be replaced with political appointees who potentially have no qualifications for the role other than their political views. Sam Hayes, the board’s new executive director, said that it would allow him to “put people in these positions that align with my vision for the agency,” though he insists that vision is not a partisan one. But there’s plenty of reason to worry that Hayes, a former GOP candidate for state attorney general who previously served as general counsel to various Republican officials, could or would truly operate without any partisan bias. And it certainly doesn’t help the public have confidence that election administration is free from politics.
But the bill would also do other things, such as ban ranked choice voting, even though it hasn’t really been used in any election in North Carolina for nearly two decades. The practice has received increased national attention since Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won New York’s mayoral primary, which uses ranked choice voting. It would allow the elections board to retain private counsel — at taxpayers’ expense — instead of lawyers from Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s office when facing lawsuits.
And, inexplicably, the bill would prevent state and local election board members from making public statements encouraging or promoting voter turnout in any election, even if it’s done in a nonpartisan way. It’s unclear what “encouraging or promoting voter turnout” is specifically referring to, however. One could argue that simply communicating information about when and how to cast a ballot could be “encouraging” people to vote. Would that no longer be allowed? If not, how are election officials supposed to do their jobs?
“The idea is that we want the state board to focus on the conduct of the election and that the responsibility for turnout is better handled by other folks,” one of the bill’s sponsors said when asked about that provision.
OK, then. But what’s wrong with encouraging people to vote? Or is it just that Republicans don’t want everyone to get the message? And who are these “other folks,” anyway?
The bill won’t pass the full House or Senate anytime soon, as legislators have already departed for a summer recess. It shouldn’t pass at all. It’s a bad bill that would do the exact opposite of what Republican lawmakers claim they want to achieve. Elections would be less free, less fair and less trustworthy.
None of the changes may seem massive on their own. But they’re part of a series of changes that, when added together, have fundamentally changed elections in our state for the worse. Shave a few days off of early voting here and there, gradually replace staff, make absentee voting harder and harder each year until you’re left with an elections system completely controlled by and for Republicans. It’s a sneaky effort, because when it’s done incrementally, it’s easy to miss the full impact.
Just look at how much has changed in the past two years. Republicans have wrenched control of the elections board from the governor and placed it in the hands of the Republican state auditor, eliminated the grace period for mail-in voting, begun implementing a flawed signature verification program for absentee ballots, reduced the timeframe for accepting provisional ballots, linked jury excuses to voter registration rolls and much more.
Now Republicans are seeking to transform elections even more, suppressing both people’s ability to vote and their faith that it will matter if they do. There’s nothing particularly free or fair about that.
