Failing the stress test of democracy

The NC GOP has whittled away at the checks and balances that protect our democracy and now control elections in the state.

NC State Auditor Dave Boliek

This primary in State Senate District 26 is a big test of the new state board of elections. Phil Berger, the most powerful Republican in the state, trails his opponent Sam Page by 23 votes. The race will probably go through at least a couple of recounts and may end up in court. This state board has never been through a full election cycle, much less a race as contested as this one.

State Auditor Dave Boliek, who appoints the state board of elections, campaigned in Rockingham County for Berger. He and his staff claim that’s no big deal. Before this year, they claim, the governor appointed the state board of elections and Roy Cooper campaigned for candidates. The difference is that the constitution gave the governor control over the board of elections. Berger gave it to Boliek. At the very least, the move shows incredibly poor judgment. Maybe they just don’t care.

Over the past fifteen years, the GOP has consistently tried to undermine democratic norms in North Carolina. They’ve taken a systematic approach to holding power and have shown no indication of stopping now. They’ve attacked checks and balances to remove the accountability that’s supposed to be built into the system.

They passed the most extreme gerrymandering in the country after the 2010 census, giving themselves veto-proof majorities in the legislature and a 10-3 majority in Congress, even though Democrats garnered more votes across the state. They’ve continued to draw districts that protect their power while limiting the will of the voters.

They passed a voter suppression bill that tried to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. They researched the methods that Black voters used most frequently and then restricted them. They figured out which kinds of identification Black citizens use and then disallowed them as a form of voter ID. They moved early voting sites away from African American communities. When the law was struck down by the courts, they attacked the judge, vowing that his ruling would be overturned by another court. It still stands today, though the Republicans have successfully implemented many of the provisions piecemeal over the past decade.

Republicans have been trying to take over the board of elections ever since Roy Cooper defeated Pat McCrory in 2016. They first tried to shift the authority of the board to the legislature, but the courts shot that down. When that didn’t work, they tried to create a nonpartisan board evenly divided between the two parties, creating a toothless agency like the Federal Election Commission, which is an essentially nonfunctioning agency consumed by deadlock. They even put a measure on the ballot as a constitutional amendment but the voters rejected it.

After losing in court so often, the Republicans decided to try to rig the judiciary. In 2018, they gerrymandered judicial and prosecutorial districts in the middle of the decade to favor GOP candidates. They passed a law reducing the size of the state Court of Appeals by preventing Roy Cooper from appointing replacements for vacancies.

They also made statewide judicial races partisan. When they realized that their MAGA base might nominate an unelectable candidate, they eliminated primaries, setting up a winner-take-all general election.

After haggling over how to rig the judicial races for much of the year, the Republicans set a filing period for court races that ended in late June. Democrat Anita Earls and Republican Barbara Jackson filed to run for the Supreme Court seat. On the last day of filing, a man named Chris Anglin filed for Supreme Court as a Republican. He had changed his registration from unaffiliated just weeks before. With no primary, he would likely split the Republican vote, handing the seat to Earls.

Republicans were apoplectic. They had stepped on a rake. In an effort to fix it, they passed a law in July that would require a candidate to have been registered with a party for at least 90 days before filing. They applied it retroactively, effectively disqualifying Anglin. The courts struck it down, but it would not be the last time the Republicans tried to change the rules of an election after the fact.

While Earls won in 2018, the Republicans’ maneuvers would pay off. By 2022, they had a majority on both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. After Josh Stein won in November, the legislature again stripped the board of elections and gave it to the auditor’s office, now controlled by Republican Dave Boliek. This time, the compliant Supreme Court allowed the move, ignoring the will of the voters and judicial precedent. That’s an activist court.

In the race for Supreme Court in 2024, the Republicans again tried to change the rules of the election after the fact. Jefferson Griffin, narrowly trailing Alison Riggs, tried to disqualify tens of thousands of voters based on a technicality even though they had shown voter IDs and been allowed to vote by boards of elections. While lower courts dismissed Griffin’s complaint, the higher courts allowed it.

Fortunately, a federal judge — a Trump appointee, no less — overruled the Supreme Court, almost mocking them by saying, “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.”

I’m afraid the GOP sees controlling the state board as a political advantage, not as a way to protect our freedoms. Boliek didn’t appoint election professionals. He appointed partisan warriors to oversee the election system.

Chair Francis X. De Luca oversaw independent expenditure campaigns targeting Democrats when he was president of the Civitas Institute. He sued to disqualify 90,000 voters after the fact when Cooper won in 2016.

Dallas Woodhouse served as executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party and worked for numerous independent expenditure groups that supported Republicans and attacked Democrats. Today, he is the state board’s liaison to the county parties. While leading the NC GOP, he sent an email to Republican county election boards urging them to make “party line” changes to early voting sites.

The executive director, Sam Hayes, seems to be a serious fellow and I hope he oversees a fair process. Still, he worked for two Republican House Speakers and was very involved in drawing the rigged maps that protect GOP majorities by reducing democracy. He needs to prove his mettle.

So, no, I don’t trust the state board of elections, because I don’t believe the Republican Party respects democracy. They’ve been trying to undermine elections in the state for 15 years. When they’ve been stopped by the checks and balances that are supposed to preserve our way of government, they’ve attacked the very system that has sustained our country for 250 years. Our state is failing the stress test of democracy and I’m afraid nobody is noticing.