NC Senate votes to shorten early voting, purge more voters

A contentious and wide-ranging set of changes to North Carolina’s elections rules passed the state Senate Tuesday following hotly contested debate between Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and passionate comments from members of the public on both sides of the aisle.

Among other changes, House Bill 958 and House Bill 834 would:

• Cut the early voting period by more than half during primary elections and municipal races.
• Reduce transparency in campaign finance elections by allowing more information about who is funding campaigns to remain secret.
• Make people wait longer after switching political parties to run for office as a member of their new party.
• Tweak the rules for challenging the validity of people’s ballots.
• Create new powers for Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek to conduct post-election audits, in addition to the audits elections officials already do after every election. 

Many of the changes were already approved earlier this month by the state House of Representatives, but the Senate made changes to the House proposal, so the House will have to approve them before sending the bill to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein for his review.

“The bill provides numerous changes that can make our state elections better-run and more secure,” Andy Jackson, an election analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation think tank, told the Senate Elections Committee on Tuesday.

Critics said the bill removes legal protections people have to ensure their votes will be counted, in addition to ramping up ways that others can try to get ballots thrown out.

“Election integrity includes protecting lawful voters from lawful exclusion,” Mark Swallow of the liberal advocacy group Democracy Out Loud told the elections committee, warning lawmakers that they “risk turning integrity into a pretext for suppression.”

In the House, and so far during Senate debates, the bill has sharply divided lawmakers with Republicans saying some of the changes are needed to strengthen or streamline elections.

Democrats say the changes will make it harder to vote and easier for bad actors to launch frivolous challenges trying to get people’s ballots thrown out. Some invoked the GOP’s failed effort in 2024 to overturn the results of a narrowly contested state Supreme Court race in which Democratic Justice Allison Riggs defeated Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin.

Sen. Sydney Batch, D-Wake, the top Democrat in the state Senate, said the changes in the bill allowing for more aggressive efforts to purge the state’s voter rolls are reminiscent of Jim Crow era efforts that used the same mechanisms to stop Black people like her from being allowed to vote for generations. She said Griffin's 2024 challenges, which could've disenfranchised tens of thousands of legitimate voters if allowed to go through by the courts, showed that the data to be used for future purges is inaccurate. 

“Forgive me for not having a lot of patience today, because in this very year we are supposed to be celebrating 250 years of prying those doors open — 250 years of hard, bloody, generational work to make the vote meaningful to each and every one of us — this chamber is taking up another bill in a long line of bills that pries back the progress that we have made,” Batch said.

The bill's GOP supporters said the numerous changes are generally intended to bolster election integrity.

"This is instituting targeted changes to help the Board of Elections properly administer elections in this state," Sen. Brad Overcash, R-Gaston, said.

Ballot challenges

State law already allows people to challenge the validity of other voters, arguing their ballots shouldn’t be counted. The proposed changes would give people more time to file challenges against anyone who votes during early voting, but not on election day itself. For years, state data has shown Democrats are more likely to vote during early voting, and Republicans are more likely to vote on election day.

Under the new rules, people would still only be allowed to challenge election day voters on that same day, but for people who vote during early voting, they’d have up to five days after the election to put together a challenge.

Sen. Julie Mayfield, D-Buncombe, asked if the bill’s GOP backers could explain the reasoning behind that change. “If someone's showing up to vote, it seems like the challenge should be made right then, to be consistent,” she said.

Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, said the state technically classifies early voting as a type of absentee voting, similar to mail-in voting, so he believes the legislature has a legal basis to make that change. People who want to challenge mail-in ballots also have five days after the election to file those challenges.

Bob Rodriguez of voter-access advocacy group Democracy Out Loud, said Georgia has a similar law — and it has led to white voters launching mass challenges against Black voters there, trying to throw out their ballots by the thousands. “I am deeply concerned about that,” he said.

Early voting reduced

Democratic lawmakers were also skeptical of the proposal to slash early voting from 17 days down to seven days for certain elections, noting that doing so could create longer lines to vote since the same number of voters would be crammed into fewer days.

Daniel, the Republican leading the bill in the Senate, said it would help reduce burden on county election staff members and noted that the cuts only apply to low-turnout elections — primaries and run-offs — not to general elections.

Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, D-Meckenburg, noted that because of how North Carolina’s districts are drawn, nearly all of the state’s legislative and congressional seats are essentially decided in the primaries, not the general election.

“My concerns are, during those times when you have more competitive races, there might be a higher turnout,” Mohammed said. “You're probably going to see longer lines on certain early voting days, and you might see longer lines on election day.”

Increasing auditor’s power

The bill also increases the power of the state auditor’s office — a recent theme of many pieces of legislation since last year, when Dave Boliek became the first Republican in decades to win election to the auditor’s office.

As with many other provisions of the bill, Republicans said the new powers they’re giving the auditor over elections are necessary to improve election integrity. Democrats said they could just as easily be used to spread misinformation or conduct politically motivated attacks.

Critics of the proposal, including members of the public and at least one Democratic lawmaker on the committee, said the new powers would give Boliek not just vastly expanded powers, but also too much freedom to pick and choose when and where to exercise those powers or not.

“The auditor can sound the alarm about minor errors in Democratic areas, but then ignore significant problems in Republican areas, thereby undermining trust in election integrity,” Democracy Out Loud’s Mark McClure told lawmakers.

After others raised concerns about giving an elected official like Boliek authority to audit elections including those that he, his allies or his enemies participated in, GOP backers of the bill noted that Boliek wouldn’t have the power on his own to overturn election results. That power lies with the state Board of Elections, whose leaders Boliek appoints.

Jim Womack, a longtime Republican activist and leader of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, said he was glad to see Boliek getting more power and hoped the bill wouldn’t exclude him from doing even more, such as going through the list of voters ahead of an election to look for people who should maybe be removed from the list of registered voters — rather than only looking back in an audit after the election is over.

“Voter rolls really need to be audited prior to the election, not post-election, because they don't really help you as much [after],” Womack said. “And I hope that this language does not restrict the state auditor from doing pre-election audits for the voter rolls and eliminating duplications, dead people. There's excellent language in here about the use of federal databases for those maintenance purposes.”

Election administrators sought three key changes that are included in the Senate proposal: shortening the deadline for voters to cast provisional ballots, allowing counties to begin tabulating early votes on Election Day before polls close, and giving election officials access to voters' full Social Security numbers to improve record matching.

Jason Tyson, a spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said the agency is fully confident it can securely protect Social Security data if lawmakers authorize the change. The board is currently not an agency that is allowed, under state law, to have access to full Social Security numbers.

Tyson also said the elections board did not push for several of the bill's other heavily debated provisions, including campaign finance disclosure changes that critics say would reduce transparency. 

“Debates over campaign finance transparency are ultimately for lawmakers to resolve,” Tyson said.