A new bill moving forward in the state legislature would allow state election officials to be hired or fired for politicial reasons for the first time in modern history, allow foreigners to make some political donations, ban ranked-choice voting and explore using AI-based signature verification software to throw out people's ballots in future elections.
The wide-ranging bill contains a mixture of requests from conservative activists, Republican state lawmakers and the newly Republican-led State Board of Elections, which came under GOP control this spring after the legislature stripped Democratic Gov. Josh Stein's power to appoint a majority of election board members.
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Stein has sued, calling it an unconstitutional power grab, and he won that argument in trial court. But the state's Republican-majority Court of Appeals allowed the changes to go forward anyway, despite not overturning the trial ruling in Stein's favor. The case remains in legal limbo, but the shift in power has happened regardless.
Several of the changes in the new bill are aimed at allowing that new GOP majority on the board to flex its political muscles ahead of the 2026 elections, in part by removing the legal protections that State Elections Board staffers have long had against political motivations behind them being hired or fired, or otherwise receiving rewards or retribution.
The bill would also exempt the elections board from some public records laws.
And it would allow the board to hire private attorneys for lawsuits instead of using state government lawyers from the attorney general's office, led by Democrat Jeff Jackson — a move that could help enrich politically connected lawyers in its attempt to ensure Democrats don't learn about GOP election strategies.
The state's new elections director, Sam Hayes, has previously said the changes are largely aimed at giving him more flexibility, and that he will try to use the new powers in a nonpartisan fashion.
Hayes added, in June when the changes were first proposed, that he wants to "make sure that the folks that are surrounding me — certainly my direct reports and I — are aligned on the vision for the agency as I set forward."
Public outcry
Republican lawmakers have said the version of the bill that was debated Wednesday is likely to change in the coming months as they hear feedback on its proposals.
The feedback they received Wednesday from many members of the public who came to speak was intensely negative, although that didn't stop the bill from passing the House Judiciary Committee in a party-line vote. Many of the speakers focused on the shift in power at the elections board — or on Republicans' attempt to overturn the results of a 2024 state Supreme Court election, saying this bill would make future attempts more likely to succeed.
"You are damning the future of democracy," said Kathy Martin.
"When you rig the State Board of Elections, you rig elections," said Karen Ziegler.
"Republicans can no longer win our elections without cheating and rigging the system, or at least getting the boards of elections and the courts to certify elections in their favor even if they don't get enough votes," said Cindy Scarbrough.
"You can just drop a wink or a nudge, and if somebody gets elected you don't like, then ... they'll find somebody that you do like, and that's the person who gets the office," said Denise Sturdy.
It wasn't only liberal speakers who came out Wednesday. Several conservative activists were there raising their own concerns — mostly targeted at the proposed rule to allow foreign people and businesses to spend money trying to influence ballot referendum campaigns in North Carolina, under certain circumstances.
Referendums include votes on topics ranging from liquor legalization to bonds funding large construction projects, as well as on new state constitutional amendments.
"There should not be foreign involvement or foreign influence in our elections," said Jim Womack, who leads the N.C. Election Integrity Team. "And I think we could still do a little better, tightening up the language to prevent foreign involvement, foreign contributions in our in our referendums."
WRAL asked bill sponsor Rep. Hugh Blackwell in June why the rules to protect some foreign political donations were needed, and who was asking for them, but his assistant said he wasn't available to answer questions. On Wednesday Blackwell didn't address the motivation behind that part of the bill but told the committee that, "this particular area, I suspect, will have some additional changes in the language."
Ranked choice voting ban
Womack had praise for other parts of the bill, including its proposed ban on ranked-choice voting in any future elections.
North Carolina briefly toyed with using ranked-choice voting in a handful of elections between 2007 and 2010. But it was a rocky start and hasn't been used again since then, depite efforts by some activists to bring it back.
"Several states are going away from it because it's so complicated, so confusing, it's just not useful," Womack said.
For other speakers, though, the proposed ranked-choice voting ban was among the worst parts of the bill.
"I talk to a lot of young people, and young people are really excited about ranked choice voting," said Khalil Thomas of the group Democracy Out Loud. "Because it is the only way to get away from a two-party system."
Signature-matching pilot
The bill would also order a new pilot program for using signature-matching software, which would throw out people's mail-in ballots if an artificial intelligence computer program decided the signature on their ballot didn't match up with their signature that other state agencies had on file.
Signature-matching programs in other states have been accused of wrongfully throwing out legitimate ballots, and critics say it's unneccessary to stop fraud here because North Carolina already requires mail-in voters to have witnesses testify they are who they say they are.
The bill doesn't propose throwing out ballots in 2026 based on signature-matching software, but instead using 2026 as a test run to see how it goes.
Republican lawmakers have been trying for several years to implement signature-matching rules, but the attempt was previously rejected by the State Board of Elections, with officials saying it was both unneccessary and troubling for its potential to throw out legitimate ballots. That was when the board had a Democratic majority, however, and the new GOP majority appears interested in moving ahead with the program.
If North Carolina did eventually implement real signature-matching rules, it would join Mississippi as the only two states in the country to require both signature-matching and witnesses for mail-in voters.
Greg Flynn, a former Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said the claims of fraud concerns cited to back signature-matching rules are "a red herring."
Other concerns
State lawmakers themselves had very little to say on the bill Wednesday, either for or against, although Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison did have several questions for Blackwell, the bill's sponsor.
Harrison said some parts of the bill would explicitly violate federal law, including a provision that would require people to provide their entire Social Security number to register to vote instead of just the last four digits. That's been illegal since the 1970s, Harrison said. Blackwell said he wasn't aware of that but would look into it.
"With regard to some of the legal issues that you raised, that's one of the things that I suspect we will be looking into a little bit closer," he said.
The State Board of Elections also recent changed the rules to require military and overseas voters to show photo identification like other voters. This bill would go a step further and stop those military and overseas voters from being allowed to use the vast majority of IDs that all other voters are allowed to use.
One of the types of IDs that would be banned, but only overseas, would be college IDs — something Harrison implied could disenfranchise college students studying abroad during an election.
Blackwell told her the goal was to protect "the integrity of the process."