(The Center Square) – North Carolina and county boards of election would most likely get equal representation from the two majority parties in legislation introduced Monday.
And a lane for the state’s largest contingent, the unaffiliateds, would be available.
Advantage for the five-member state panel and each of the respective 100 county boards resides with the party of the governor, each getting a 3-2 edge. That office-holder would no longer make any of the appointments that number 505 and would drop to 408.
At the state level, the board would grow to eight with two picks by each General Assembly chamber leader, and two picks each for both leaders of the minority party in each chamber. The counties would reduce to four members, each getting a pick by the respective chamber leaders, and the respective minority party leaders of each chamber.
No Partisan Advantage in Elections, as Senate Bill 749 is known, was introduced by Republicans and immediately rebuked by the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party just elected in February as a 25-year-old, and by the 65-year-old term-limited governor.
Though the governor is credited with all appointments, in reality, the choices come up through respective parties. State board members are chosen from the state party and the governor asked to grant them, and county parties give their picks to their respective state party to hand over to the governor.
Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and Sens. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, and Paul Newton, R-Cabarrus, hosted a press conference Monday afternoon as introduction. If approved, the changes would take effect immediately at the state board, and in 2024 for county boards.
“North Carolinians deserve to have confidence in the elections process and we believe this bill moves us in that direction,” Berger said, noting a recent poll that showed roughly half of voters do not believe elections are free and fair.
“We have a duty as legislators to do what we can to rebuild that trust in the election process,” Daniel said.
Daniel noted that while the state party chairs of North Carolina’s two largest political parties would continue to submit a list of nominees for consideration under SB749, “the leaders in the General Assembly would not be required to appoint from those lists,” which opens the opportunity for unaffiliated voters to serve on elections boards.
As of Saturday, the split of the state’s more than 7.2 million registered voters is 35.9% unaffiliated, 33.2% Democrats and 30.2% Republicans. In recent years, the unaffiliated group has grown significantly and Democrats have decreased.
“This is just the latest in a series of power grabs by far-right Republicans in the General Assembly,” said Anderson Clayton, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. “When the voters elected Governor Cooper twice, they did so with the expectation and desire that he would be making appointments to the Board of Elections – but we know the NCGOP’s playbook is to just change the rules instead of trying to win fair and square on the strength of their ideas.”
Despite a pattern that paints the state purple, with blue in heavily populated urban centers and red in roughly 75% of the 100 countys that are mainly of rural nature, the Democrats’ position is to be expected. Since Daniel Lindsay Russell held the governor’s office from 1897-1901, North Carolinians have elected Democrats with exception of James Holshouser (1973-77), Jim Martin (1985-93) and Pat McCrory (2013-17) – and governors could not be reelected during three-quarters of the 20th century.
Gov. Roy Cooper, with just under 19 months of lame duck status to go, took to Twitter to attack.
“The legislative Republican record is clear: Rig elections with gerrymandered districts, make it harder for people they disagree with to vote, and make it easier to throw those votes out,” Cooper wrote in a statement. “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 last thing our democracy needs is for our elections to be run by people who want to rig them for partisan gain.”
Senate leaders acknowledged SB749 and other pending legislation to rework the appointment processes for nine key boards and commissions could face legal challenges. A similar measure to create bipartisan election boards was blocked by the state Supreme Court in a lawsuit brought by Cooper. That case followed McCrory v. Berger in which the state Supreme Court nixed legislation that shifted power over appointments to the Coal Ash Management Commission, Oil and Gas Commission, and Mining Commission from the governor to the General Assembly.
The state Supreme Court has had different eras of being nonpartisan, and being majority by party – including both ways since Republicans gained majorities in the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in 140 years. It last changed in 2016, and 2009 before that.
Justice Paul Newby, now chief justice of a court with 5-2 Republican advantage, was the lone dissenter in the latter case. He wrote “to overturn a law of the people acting through the General Assembly, the Court must find an express constitutional violation beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Senate leaders said they believe elements of the litigation were wrongly decided.
“Having a bipartisan board of elections, we believe, would comply with the constitution,” Berger said. “We don’t think that the issue that would be brought forward with this legislation has been decided by a court.”
Newton noted that the Federal Elections Commission operates in a similar fashion.
“Because this structure works at the federal level, we believe it can work at the state level,” he said. “Our current system is not serving us well.
“No one person, no one party, should have exclusive control over our elections.”
In recent years, dating to the ballot harvesting scandal of 2018 in southeastern North Carolina, pivotal decisions by the state panel have often been party-line 3-2 votes.
Voters soundly rejected a ballot proposal in 2018 to create an evenly split bipartisan election board, though Berger said the appointment process in that proposal was different than SB749.
House Republicans are on board with the bill’s changes on the state level, but chamber leaders are “still having conversations about the local boards,” Berger said.
The Senate leader told reporters he expects SB749 and other election law changes in Senate Bill 747 to begin moving through the Senate this week.
