An effort to shift political control over the rules for North Carolina's elections — in 2024 and beyond — ran into an unexpected delay Tuesday. Republican state lawmakers had hoped to advance a bill that would shift power of state and local elections boards, but a top GOP legislator announced the vote would be delayed until at least next week.
House Speaker Tim Moore later told reporters that the bill needed a few tweaks before it would be ready for a vote, although the details of those pending changes weren't clear. At the same time, the delay came as protesters arrived at the legislature to decry the proposed measure. Some groups had announced their intention to disrupt the voting session in protest, and there was an elevated police presence at the legislature when the decision was made to delay the vote.
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The bill's GOP sponsors say Senate Bill 749 is needed to improve people's trust in election integrity. But professional election administrators have objected, saying the legislation will create chaos and deadlock if it becomes law — harming people's faith in the integrity of elections, rather than improving it.
Liberal activists and pro-democracy groups gathered at the legislature Tuesday to hold a press conference denouncing the bill. The bill already passed the Senate in a party-line vote. Tuesday's hearing comes on the heels of another bill, vetoed last month by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, that would enact stricter rules for voting by mail.
The main change in the now-delayed elections bill would be to end the state's rule, in place for all of modern history, that whichever party controls the governor's office gets a majority on the State Board of Elections as well as on individual county election boards. Right now, because Cooper is a Democrat, Democrats have a 3-2 advantage on the state and local election boards.
The bill currently under consideration would create evenly split boards — with equal numbers of members from both major political parties.
"This is a scheme that voters soundly rejected in 2018, with 61% of the vote," Melissa Price Kromm, director of NC Voters for Clean Elections, said at a news conference Tuesday morning. "It is a scheme that the courts have already struck down as unconstitutional. It is an attack on the very foundations of our democracy."
The GOP has tried passing similar rules several times since Cooper became governor, but previous efforts failed. Voters shot down the idea by a large margin in 2018, when legislators had proposed it as a constitutional amendment. And twice the state Supreme Court has ruled similar plans unconstitutional. The Republican Party flipped control of the Supreme Court earlier this year, and GOP lawmakers have expressed hope that they can get the changes approved his time — and that they'll pass judicial muster in the face of possible legal challenges — since their party now controls the court.
Republican lawmakers say voters are inherently distrustful of any system in which one party controls the rules for elections. But Democrats have said there's no proof of any actual misdeeds under either party's control — pointing out that Cooper won the 2016 governor's race when the elections board was under Republican control, and that then-president Donald Trump, a Republican, won North Carolina in 2020 when the elections board was under Democratic control.
Democrats fear the true motive of the GOP-backed plan is to drastically cut down on the availability of early voting. Democratic voters tend to use early voting more than Republican voters. County boards of elections are in charge of choosing early voting sites, and a hypothetical tie vote in the future could lead to no early voting sites being approved at all.
Tied votes on key issues could end up being decided by the courts in a drawn-out legal process, or by the state legislature, rather than by local or state elections officials, critics say.
"It would be a disaster," Ann Webb, policy director at Common Cause North Carolina, said at the news conference. "And there would be every incentive for partisan gridlock to cause that kind of disaster."