They just got caught

The board of elections didn't discipline Dallas Woodhouse for pressuring election officials. They just reassigned him.

The State Board of Elections reassigned Dallas Woodhouse from his position as liaison to the county boards of elections. I’m glad that they made that decision, but it doesn’t give me any more confidence that the State Board of Elections is acting as a nonpartisan agency. They just got caught doing what they said they weren’t.

Woodhouse was using his position to pressure county boards of elections to make voting more difficult for constituencies likely to vote Democratic. He pressured Jackson County election board members to remove an early voting site from the campus of Western Carolina University. He told Pasquotank County officials to end Sunday voting.

Woodhouse was using his position to gain political advantage for the GOP. And he was doing it with the tacit approval of the state auditor and the state board of elections. Nobody admitted he did anything wrong. If they had, he would have been fired or disciplined, not reassigned.

Republicans clearly see controlling the state board of elections as a political advantage, not the administration of fair elections. Their goal is to undermine democracy, not promote it. They underlined that fact by putting political hacks in charge instead of election professionals.

Woodhouse is still in-house at the board of elections. Former president of the Civitas Institute Francis De Luca is still board chair. And Sam Hayes, former legal counsel for two Republican House Speakers, is still executive director. They’ve done nothing to build confidence that they will oversee free and fair elections. They haven’t even tried.

Republicans have been trying to rig elections to favor them for so long their antics barely get the attention of the press. A decade ago, appointing a former executive director of a political party to the state board of elections would have caused an uproar. Today, it barely gets noticed, even when they get caught.