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North Carolina GOP uses gerrymandered supermajority to take over election boards and restrict voting [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-10-10  

North Carolina Republicans have used their gerrymandered supermajorities to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes of two bills that threaten voting rights and election integrity ahead of next year's hotly contested elections. One of the newly enacted laws strips Cooper of the power to shape election administration in the Tar Heel State, and effectively transfers it to GOP elected officials. The other law directly restricts access to voting and quickly drew two federal lawsuits challenging various provisions soon after it was enacted.

The first new law will dramatically reshape the state Board of Elections as well as the local election boards that the state board oversees in all 100 counties. Under previous law, the governor appointed all of the board members selected from recommendations made by both major state party organizations. The governor's party currently controls a one-seat majority on every board, which all have an odd number of members to deter ties. And the Democratic majorities under Cooper have adopted policies to expand voting access.

Republicans' new law instead creates evenly divided election boards with half the members chosen by each party's legislative leaders. That change would allow GOP board members to force deadlocks, which would in turn throw major decisions to Republican elected officials: The law would let the legislature appoint a board chair and executive director, while the GOP-dominated state courts could step in to decide on disputes the law does not address.

And thanks to another law Republicans passed in 2018, when they last held veto-proof majorities, county boards that fail to agree on an early voting plan would revert to offering just one early voting location per county regardless of population, with limited operating hours. This would include North Carolina's most populous counties, which are home to millions of people—and lean Democratic. And it would punish Democratic voters even further because they've historically used in-person early voting in much greater numbers than Republicans.

Republicans had used control over the boards to restrict voting access after Pat McCrory became governor in 2013, but right after Cooper defeated McCrory in 2016, the GOP tried to strip the new governor's control over the boards. However, the state Supreme Court twice struck down the GOP's changes for violating the state constitution's separation of powers, and voters rejected—by a 62-32 landslide—Republicans' subsequent attempt to enact it as a constitutional amendment in 2018.

However, those state Supreme Court rulings were handed down when Democrats still held the majority, but Republicans won control over the court last fall. In April, the new GOP majority opened the floodgates for more extreme Republican gerrymandering and further voting restrictions after it broke with longstanding precedent to overturn recent rulings in which Democrats had been the majority.

The state Supreme Court's lurch far to the right sets up a potential worst-case scenario under the new legislation: GOP board members could refuse to certify close elections that Democrats win, which would instead send decisions on any such matters to the very same Republican justices who just enabled their party's gerrymanders and voting restrictions. The proposed system could quickly become self-reinforcing to favor Republicans.

Meanwhile, the new voting law adopts several restrictions purportedly aimed at curbing voter fraud despite the fact that it's incredibly rare. One provision makes it harder for citizens to rely on same-day voter registration, which lets new voters register and cast a ballot at the same time during the state's early voting period. The law now disqualifies any ballots cast this way if a confirmation card sent by the postal service cannot be delivered after just a single attempt; previously, the post office would try twice.

This new requirement increases the risk that postal errors could disenfranchise voters through no fault of their own. It could also be problematic for certain groups—which tend to lean toward Democrats—that typically move more often or have short-term addresses, such as college students registering to vote where they go to school while keeping a permanent address back home. Furthermore, Black voters have historically been more likely to use same-day registration than whites.

Another provision requires mail ballots to be returned to election officials by the close of polls on Election Day, eliminating a grace period that allowed ballots to be postmarked by Election Day but received up to three days after. However, mail ballots from military and overseas voters will still have a nine-day grace period.

Two other features of the law also make it more likely that absentee ballots will be rejected. One ends the ability of voters to fix problems with mail ballots that are missing witness information. The other establishes a pilot program to test a new signature-verification process, even though such systems have been fraught with problems, especially since voter signatures often change over time.

The legislation also bans any private grants to fund local election administration, following similar moves by other Republican-led states. Those bans have come about in response to conspiracy theories about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to a nonprofit that helped election officials cope with COVID-related disruptions. Republican legislators have baselessly claimed that private funding risks corrupting election integrity but have done nothing to alleviate the chronic insufficiency of public funding that necessitated it.

One especially alarming part of the new law allows any voter to challenge the eligibility of another voter in the same county; previously, they could only challenge voters in the same precinct. Republicans in other states have adopted similar legislation that has enabled a small number of far-right activists to challenge tens of thousands of registrants who are disproportionately Democrats and voters of color. A related measure gives partisan "poll watchers" more leeway to move freely around polling places and observe and photograph voters, increasing the risk of harassment and intimidation.

A central figure behind this new law is attorney Cleta Mitchell, who has led GOP voter-suppression efforts nationwide and played a central role in Trump's attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Despite GOP claims to the contrary, leaked documents obtained by WRAL News show that Mitchell was heavily involved in writing the new legislation. Just months ago, the Washington Post reported that Mitchell had secretly pitched an explicit voter-suppression plan to Republican National Committee donors that called for "limit[ing] voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters."

Courts had previously struck down similar laws that Republicans passed over the last decade, with one federal court ruling in 2016 going so far as to say the GOP had targeted Black voters "with almost surgical precision." However, Republicans have since expanded their grip on the federal courts, in addition to retaking the state Supreme Court, putting the success of future legal challenges in doubt.

These two new laws aren't the only pieces of legislation that North Carolina Republicans have passed recently to cement their hold on power. The GOP enacted a state budget that became law last week and contains several power-grabbing provisions to strengthen their grip on the state court system, make it easier to secretly pass new gerrymanders later this month, and enable GOP elected officials to handpick the trial-level judges who would hear lawsuits against the state—such as ones challenging their new gerrymanders and voting restrictions.

North Carolina has been a hotly contested battleground state in nearly every election since 2008, when Barack Obama became the first Democrat to win its electoral votes in three decades. And 2024 is shaping up to see competitive contests for president, governor, and many other races once again. It's no coincidence that, over this same time period, Republicans have passed law after law to restrict voting access. Their new legislation is just the latest in a long-running effort to entrench themselves in power regardless of their popular support.

This story has been updated to include that voting rights groups have filed lawsuits challenging parts of the voting restriction law soon after it passed.

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