Dozens of protesters gathered outside the North Carolina General Assembly ahead of the start of debate Tuesday morning over a new bill that would make wide-ranging changes to election laws.
Republican supporters of House Bill 958 say it can help improve election integrity. Democratic critics say it will do the opposite, and harm democracy. More changes are likely coming to the bill; GOP leaders pulled it from a committee Tuesday afternoon in order to work on amendments. A vote is still possible as soon as Wednesday.
As of Tuesday, the bill would mandate more secrecy around campaign finance, stricter rules for voting, a statewide ban on ranked-choice voting, a new system for post-election audits and a ban on elections officials from encouraging people to vote.
It would also create new legal authority for State Board of Elections leaders to hire or fire staff members for purely political reasons, exempting them from protections most state employees have against the politicization of their jobs. The elections board staff is in charge of investigating allegations of voter fraud or campaign finance violations, handling legal issues, maintaining election technology systems, conducting public outreach and more.
State elections director Sam Hayes, a former top lawyer for legislative Republicans, defended that provision in the bill as a way to help him hire more staff more quickly. He also said he believes he has a track record, since taking over the elections board last year, of avoiding partisan shakeups in the office.
“It’s important to note, I have not terminated a single employee since I have been at the agency,” he said. “And I’ve not even asked a single person to leave.”
The bill would also make it easier for members of the public to challenge other people’s eligibility to vote. Throughout the past decade, some conservative groups and political operatives have accused voters of committing fraud — such as by voting twice or voting while ineligible — only to find the allegations were errant, such as by mixing up voters with the same name.
Democrats said further empowering those kinds of challenges will cause chaos and confusion. Republicans said it’s worth it, if it does end up catching any fraud.
“What’s going to happen is you’re going to have eligible ballots that get tossed,” said Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, invoking GOP efforts to try to throw out valid votes cast in the 2024 state Supreme Court election to overturn the result that saw Democratic Justice Allison Riggs narrowly defeat appellate court Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger.
Bill sponsor Rep. Hugh Blackwell, R-Burke, defended the proposal. “Nobody should object to a process that simply results in the removal of a vote that should not have been cast,” he said. “And if that changes an outcome, that’s probably appropriate.”
Blackwell added that he hasn’t ignored critics of the bill. He worked with Democrats to add some new language to the bill giving due process to people accused of voter fraud, and he and other Republicans voted to add those changes to the bill Tuesday.
“I’ve been very agreeable with you guys in trying to add some due process connections, if somebody gets challenged, so that it’s just not automatic and they don’t have a way of trying to correct the record,” Blackwell told Harrison Tuesday.
The contentious hearing saw leaders of the House Election Committee decline to allow any of the members of the public to speak at the meeting. A few dozen protesters were allowed inside the committee room; more than 100 more gathered outside.
The committee gave itself a self-imposed deadline of meeting for only 50 minutes. Blackwell spent most of that time reading through the bill, leaving only a few minutes for questions by lawmakers who serve on the committee, and none for members of the public to weigh in. Democrats asked to extend the meeting but were denied.
“This bill does so much that limiting it to a 50-minute discussion is almost snubbing the people’s voice,” Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake, said. “We need more time to ask questions and discuss this.”
Leading the protests Tuesday was North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton. She said this bill, if it becomes law, will be another in a line of GOP-backed efforts to cut back on voting access in the state, including a decision Friday to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State University’s student union. Among other changes in the bill being discussed Tuesday was a provision that would block overseas voters from being allowed to use student IDs to vote.
“Access to the ballot box has significantly been restricted, and boards of elections have become so disgustingly partisan that we’re having to go out and fight at these meetings to preserve polling sites across college campuses and everywhere in North Carolina,” Clayton said.
Details of the bill
Much of the bill focuses on Republican Party priorities, such as enshrining into law some of the theories the GOP tried using in 2024 in an unsuccessful bid to overturn the result of that year’s state Supreme Court race. The changes were already in place due to court rulings, but passing them into law would make them more permanent.
Those include provisions to require overseas voters to show photo identification, and to ban overseas voters from using certain types of IDs that all other voters can show, such as student IDs. It would also formalize a ban on so-called “never-resident” voters. Those are people who are U.S. citizens, born to North Carolina parents, but who have never lived in the U.S. — for example children of soldiers or religious missionaries. The legislature voted years ago to let those people vote in state elections, with broad bipartisan support, but Republicans have recently sought to revoke their voting rights, at least for state-level elections.
Increased secrecy for some campaign finance transactions is another major focus of the bill. If it becomes law there would be less transparency required of individual donors, political groups, political parties and individual politicians.
Additionally, it could potentially allow foreign people, governments and corporations to indirectly spend money on groups involved with ballot referendums — such as efforts to support or oppose new constitutional amendments — although they’d remain banned from direct political contributions. The bill says groups involved in ballot referendums would need to attest that they hadn’t “knowingly or willfully accepted funds aggregating in excess of $10,000 from one or more foreign national” within the prior four years.
The bill would also make any investigations into foreign campaign contributions secret, and punish any leaks with criminal charges.
The bill would also require people to have belonged to a political party for at least a year in order to run for office. In some instances, Republicans have accused their own party’s candidates of being secret Democrats, trying to split the GOP vote and help Democrats win. Such complaints were lodged in 2018 against a state Supreme Court candidate, and again in this year’s primary elections when the state GOP accused six Republican legislative candidates, running on platforms of supporting public schools, of being “disingenuous bad actors.” None of them won those elections.
Those proposals — plus changes that would increase pay for political appointees to elections boards and that could put state taxpayers on the hook to help fight lawsuits against county-level election boards — all come as control over elections in the state has shifted from Democratic to Republican control, a longtime goal of the state legislature.
Several of the legislature’s previous attempts to take away the governor’s power over elections were ruled unconstitutional or shot down by voters at the ballot box. The latest move — taking power to appoint election officials from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and giving it to Republican Auditor Dave Boliek — was also blocked in court last year as unconstitutional. But the Republican-majority state Court of Appeals allowed the switch to take place regardless, while the lawsuit moves forward. The appeals court heard no arguments, didn’t say which judges were involved in the ruling and provided no explanation for its decision.
There are also measures in the bill that could appeal to voters of all stripes, such as an expanded period for people to fix issues with their ballots to ensure they’re counted.
For instance, if people voting by mail sign their ballot in the wrong place or forget to include a copy of their photo identification, they currently have three days to fix those problems and avoid having their votes thrown out. This bill would expand that “cure” period to five days.
New audits
The bill would also give Boliek the power to personally conduct post-election audits. For years, state elections officials have conducted audits after every election, but some have been more intensive than others.
This bill wouldn’t let Boliek stop the certification of elections, which would still be up to the elections board, but it would give him new powers to look into processes at the state level, or any individual counties, to ensure the accuracy of their voter rolls, the integrity of their reported results, recordkeeping and “any areas of concern regarding election accuracy, security, or credibility.”
Boliek supports that provision.
“Post-election audits focused on the processes and procedures of elections will help improve confidence in our system of voting,” he said in a written statement. “This is common-sense electoral policy that will deliver additional accountability and transparency to voters across North Carolina.”
Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake, questioned the optics of letting a politician lead audits into his own election, or those of his political allies.
“He is a partisan actor,” Rubin said. “He campaigns for candidates. And so he can now say, after an election, ‘My candidate didn’t do well in this district.’ Or he could say, ‘I personally didn’t do well in this county.’ And he could pick that county for an audit afterwards?
“I know the statute says it won’t affect the outcome of the election,” Rubin continued. “But going into a county afterwards, as the person running for office, and grabbing their ballot boxes, is going to send a message.”
