GOP lawmakers to take aim at NC's Democratic-controlled State Board of Elections, in advance of 2024
State Republican lawmakers rolled out massive proposed changes Monday to how the left-leaning State Board of Elections would be run in the future.
Senate leader Phil Berger and other top Republicans held a press conference Monday, telling reporters the changes are needed to improve voters' confidence in elections.
Their plan, Senate Bill 749, is highly similar to other GOP-backed changes to overhaul the elections board in recent years. The others have all failed — either ruled unconstitutional in court, or shot down at the ballot box by voters.
Republican lawmakers say they want to try again, for the sake of election integrity.
“It’s incontrovertible that we’re living in a time of severe partisan polarization, and that affects voters’ perception of election fairness,” Sen. Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, said. “When you have an elections board that’s controlled by one party, roughly half of the voters are going to question and doubt the fairness of the elections — and, in some cases, the outcome.”
Democrats have controlled the board since 2017, due to a state law that says whichever party holds the governor's office also gets three of the five seats on the state elections board.
"The legislative Republican record is clear," Democratic Gov. Cooper said in a written statement Monday. "Rig elections with gerrymandered districts, make it harder for people they disagree with to vote, and make it easier to throw those votes out. Now they want to seize control of the State Board of Elections despite the Supreme Court repeatedly ruling that to be an unconstitutional power grab."
The Republican-led legislature tried changing the election board's makeup as soon as Cooper was elected governor, to use a system similar to the one they're proposing again now. The board would increase to eight members if this bill becomes law, with four picked by Democratic lawmakers and four picked by Republican lawmakers.
That same idea was ruled unconstitutional five years ago. But as of this year, Republicans now also control a majority on the state Supreme Court. Berger indicated Monday that the new court, whose members include his son, Republican Justice Phil Berger Jr., could be open to overturning the existing legal precedent and letting the changes go into place.
"There were some instances in that decision, I believe — and pointed out by the dissenting opinions — that that decision may very well have been wrongfully decided," Berger said.
Raleigh Sen. Dan Blue, the top Democrat in that chamber, said the bill would cause more uncertainty in elections, not less, and it's not what's best for the state.
“This Senate Republican elections bill goes straight to the heart of democracy," he said. "This is a power grab, plain and simple. Republican lawmakers have tried and failed to take over state and local elections for years."
County-level elections boards ar set up similarly to the state board. This bill would also change those county boards to have an equal number of seats, split between the two parties.
The Federal Elections Commission has a similar setup, with equal number of seats for both Democrats and Republicans. It's widely regarded as ineffective, with votes on important issues like campaign finance violations or foreign election influence frequently ending in ties along party lines. A tie means no action can be taken.
But bringing a similar system to North Carolina could be good, said Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, since the possibility for tie votes "would incentive compromise between members, instead of giving members an opening to ram through partisan priorities."
The new proposal to change who's in charge of elections comes on the heels of a different bill, also aimed at the 2024 elections and beyond, that GOP leaders recently proposed to intense criticism from Democrats. That wide-ranging elections bill aims to crack down on mail-in voting, give new rights to partisan election observers and make numerous other changes to voting rules in North Carolina.
WRAL News reported that Cleta Mitchell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign who was involved in trying to overturn the election results, met in private with top GOP lawmakers to discuss the bill before it was made public. Mitchell and the bill sponsors say she didn’t have any role in writing the bill.
As for the State Board of Elections, it's the agency in charge of making sure elections run smoothly. Its board members have the power to set rules for elections, choose which voting machines to use, make rulings on allegations of fraud, decide whether to certify election results and more.
This bill would make it easier for the board to throw out election results in the future by requiring just five of the eight members to vote in favor of redoing an election. Current law requires near-unanimous support, from four of the five members.
Past attempts by the Republican-led legislature to overhaul the elections board began in 2016, when Cooper defeated Republican Gov. Pat McCrory — thus allowing Democrats to regain a 3-2 majority on the elections board. Cooper remains governor and will be termed out after the 2024 election.
After Republicans’ original plans were twice ruled unconstitutional, GOP leaders sought to get around the courts — by changing the constitution. The proposed a constitutional amendment in 2018 to overhaul the elections board and decrease Democrats' power on the board.
But in a shocking result, voters shot it down. Throughout state history, constitutional amendments have rarely ever failed to pass. But that one did; two-thirds of voters opposed it.
The opposition came after every living former governor — three Democrats and two Republicans — publicly put aside their political differences and jointly urged people to vote down that amendment.
"This is not about partisan politics. It's about power politics, and it must be stopped," former Republican Gov. Jim Martin, who served as governor from 1985 to 1993, said at the time.
The coalition of ex-governors also opposed another legislative power grab that had been on the ballot in 2018, to shift the power to appoint judges from the governor to the legislature. That one also failed, even as voters approved four other amendments that year.
