State House lawmakers gave near-final approval Tuesday to technical corrections to the recently approved state budget. They also passed changes for election rules that could impact the 2026 midterms and all future races in North Carolina.
The proposed budget changes include many small items needed to fix errors or oversights in the state’s new spending plan, which became law a month ago. But corrections contained in House Bill 268 also include bigger, more contentious provisions including power-shift provisions targeting Stein and fellow Democratic official Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.
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The changes would also spend up to $65 million on sporting events — bolstering next year’s Military World Games in Charlotte and paying the PGA to keep a golf tournament in Greensboro.
The changes were approved by the state Senate last week. After Tuesday's bipartisan, 81-29 vote in the House, it'll need one final vote Wednesday before it can go to Stein for him to approve or deny.
Some other changes in the budget correction bill included bolstering loans and grants for hospitals and child care programs.
And although lawmakers initially proposed cutting hundreds of vacant state jobs in the budget, lawmakers got pushback from some agencies and have now agreed to put jobs back into a few of them, lessening the impact of those cuts, according to Rep. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth, a top House budget writer.
Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, singled out the tens of millions for sporting events, saying that money could be better spent on many other priorities.
"If we want to spend $65 million, let's look to the west and Hurricane Helene victims," Morey said. "Or let's look to our food banks. Or let's look to Legal Aid, that was cut with IOLTA funds. Let's look to the people in need in North Carolina, and not the sports industry."
Lambeth said the PGA tournament in question in Greensboro — the Wyndham Championship — is an important event for his area of the state. The bill contains other new spending aimed at bringing in economic development to the state, Lambeth noted, such as an extra $15 million for the film grant program used to lure movie and television shoots to North Carolina.
Changing election rules
The House also gave final approval to a wide-ranging set of changes to the state’s elections laws, which now go to Stein.
Those originated in the House and passed in June, but then the Senate split the changes up into two separate bills, House Bill 958 and House Bill 834. While the changes in HB 834 won some bipartisan support, HB 958 passed purely along party lines.
The more politically contentious bill would shorten the length of early voting for some elections, tweak the rules intended to stop non-citizens from registering to vote, give Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek additional election-audit powers, and ramp up purges of voting — purges critics say could disenfranchise legitimate voters, by relying on faulty data and including no additional due process right for those targeted.
Republicans say the changes are needed for efficiency and election integrity. Democrats said if Republicans truly wanted to truly protect election integrity, they wouldn’t have deleted language — which was in a previous version of House Bill 958, but not the final version — that gave people due process rights when someone tries to purge them from the voting rolls.
“It offends due process,” Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake, said. “And fundamentally, it offends the right to vote.”
He added: “Where's even the reasoning for that? There is none. There is a resounding lack of any sensible reason for the passage of this bill.”
Bill sponsor Rep. Hugh Blackwell, R-Burke, said in a written statement after the vote that “North Carolinians want elections they can trust, and House Republicans have consistently advanced practical reforms to improve election integrity.”
GOP leaders didn’t explain why they separated the election changes into two bills. But if lawmakers feared Stein would issue a veto due to Democrats’ opposition to some of the changes, then splitting the less controversial measures into a separate bill could improve the likelihood that they could still become law if the others are blocked or delayed by a potential veto.
Democrats, meanwhile, have filed their own list of proposed new elections rules, largely aimed at countering what they see as election misinformation and voter suppression tactics from President Donald Trump or his GOP allies in federal, state or local agencies.
The changes in House Bill 1246 would ban the deployment of troops or other armed agents at polling places, ramp up criminal penalties for harassing voters or election workers, protect early voting from being cut and disqualify elections officials who refuse to certify election results without evidence, among other changes.
It would also create a new law stating that voters can’t have their ballots thrown out based on new interpretations of rules after an election is over — a reaction to GOP efforts in 2024 to overturn the results of that year’s election for state Supreme Court by throwing out more than 60,000 voters’ ballots, which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional.
Those Democratic-supported proposals are expected to fail in the GOP-controlled legislature, and not be allowed up for a vote.
“Efforts to subvert vote counting and the recognition of election winners are, by definition, destructive to our system of democracy and the rule of law,” the bill says. “There can be no government ‘of, by and for the people’ if officials are dishonest about election results.”
During Tuesday’s debate over the GOP-backed election bills, Rubin said he and other Democrats had worked with House Republicans to negotiate a few changes, largely aimed at preventing either party from attempting another strategy like Griffin’s 2024 lawsuit to overturn the election results by selectively challenging the rules to target certain voters and try to modify the outcome.
Even though the House initially signed off on new rules stopping similar legal strategies in the future, the Senate stripped those provisions from the bill. On Tuesday Rubin and other Democrats chastised House Republicans for allowing that to happen and not standing up to Senate Republicans to demand the changes be kept in place, to protect legitimate voters from having their ballots thrown out.
“We had actually negotiated a change into the House bill before that said: ‘You know what? That's actually really dangerous,’” Rubin said. “‘You don't want candidates strategically filing challenges just to try and win an election. We should win elections at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.’ And the Senate went through and said, ‘Actually, yeah, we do want that.’”