More secrecy around who’s funding political campaigns, stricter rules for voting, a statewide ban on ranked-choice voting and a new system for post-election audits are among the things North Carolina Republican lawmakers are now proposing in a wide-ranging elections bill.

The bill proposing the election law changes hadn’t been made public as of Monday morning, although lawmakers plan to begin voting on it Tuesday morning. WRAL and other news outlets obtained a copy that indicated dozens of changes to North Carolina election laws are under consideration. Some are relatively minor, while others could have sweeping consequences.

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The bill is scheduled for an initial committee hearing at 10 a.m. Tuesday and could speed through the state House, potentially advancing to other votes later in the day.

The bill also seeks to ban elections officials from encouraging people to vote. And it would create new legal authority to hire or fire staffers at the State Board of Elections for purely political reasons, by exempting them from protections most state employees have against the politicization of their jobs. The board of elections staff is in charge of investigating allegations of voter fraud or campaign finance violations, handling legal issues, maintaining election technology systems, conducting public outreach and more.

The bill would also require people to have belonged to a political party for at least a year in order to run for office. In some instances, Republicans have accused their own party’s candidates of being secret Democrats, trying to split the GOP vote and help Democrats win. Such complaints were lodged in 2018 against a state Supreme Court candidate, and again in this year’s primary elections when the state GOP accused six Republican legislative candidates, running on platforms of supporting public schools, of being “disingenuous bad actors.” None of them won those elections.

Those proposals, plus changes that would pay political appointees to elections boards more and that could put state taxpayers on the hook to help fight lawsuits against county-level election boards, all come as control over elections in the state has shifted from Democratic to Republican control, a longtime goal of the state legislature.

Several of the legislature’s previous attempts to take away the governor’s power over elections were ruled unconstitutional or shot down by voters at the ballot box. The latest move — taking power to appoint election officials from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and giving it to Republican Auditor Dave Boliek — was also blocked in court last year as unconstitutional. But the Republican-majority state Court of Appeals allowed the switch to take place regardless, while the lawsuit moves forward. The appeals court heard no arguments, didn’t say which judges were involved in the ruling and provided no explanation for its decision.

The bill would also give Boliek the power to personally conduct post-election audits. For years, the state has conducted audits after every election, but some have been more intensive than others.

This bill wouldn't let Boliek stop the certification of elections, which would still be up to the elections board, but it would give him new powers to look into processes at the state level, or any individual counties, to ensure the accuracy of their voter rolls, the integrity of their reported results, recordkeeping and "any areas of concern regarding election accuracy, security, or credibility."

Much of the bill focuses on Republican Party priorities, such as enshrining into law some of the theories the GOP tried using in 2024 in an unsuccessful bid to overturn the result of that year’s state Supreme Court race. The changes were already in place due to court rulings, but passing them into law would make them more permanent.

Those include provisions to require overseas voters to show photo identification, and a ban on so-called “never-resident” voters. Those are people who are U.S. citizens, born to North Carolina parents, but who have never lived in the U.S. — for example children of soldiers or religious missionaries. The legislature voted years ago to let those people vote in state elections, with broad bipartisan support, but Republicans have recently sought to revoke their voting rights, at least for state-level elections.

There are also measures in the bill that could appeal to voters of all stripes, such as an expanded period for people to fix issues with their ballots to ensure they’re counted.

For instance, if people voting by mail sign their ballot in the wrong place or forget to include a copy of their photo identification, they currently have three days to fix those problems and avoid having their votes thrown out. This bill would expand that “cure” period to five days.

Campaign finance

On campaign finance rules, the bill proposes a number of changes:

  • Foreign nationals, who include people, governments and corporations based outside the U.S., would be allowed to spend up to $10,000 on ballot referendums — such as efforts to support or oppose new constitutional amendments — but would remain banned from contributing directly to politicians. The bill would make any investigations into violations of that law secret, however, and punish any leaks with criminal charges.
    • The bill would also increase the amount of money political campaigns can spend, or that individuals can give, without having to reveal who’s behind the money or what it’s being spent on. Depending on the types of spending and fundraising in question, some thresholds would rise from $50 to $100, while others would rise from $100 to $1,000, or from $1,000 to $3,000.
      • The bill would also allow political parties to keep secret what they’re spending on certain types of election work.
        • And for reports that are currently required in the closing days of some elections, detailing who’s giving money to political campaigns, it would change the rules to allow more campaigns not to have to report anything at all. But that change is aimed at races that receive less attention anyway, such as politicians who aren’t raising much money, or who are running uncontested. It wouldn’t affect high-profile elections.