A voting rights group called Tuesday for state and local officials to investigate whether allies of North Carolina’s former governor and the state Republican Party broke laws when hundreds of people were accused of voter fraud or absentee ballot irregularities last November. “We are calling on them to enforce state and federal laws that protect…
After being rebuffed once by judges who determined lawmakers went too far, Republican legislators on Tuesday tried a second time to dilute the power of North Carolina’s new Democratic governor to run elections. In separate votes, the state House and Senate voted along party lines to trim the power governors have had for more than a century to oversee elections by appointing the state and county elections boards that settle disputes and enforce ballot laws. The state elections board has had five members appointed by the governor, with the majority being members of the governor’s party, since 1901, according to state records. Gov. Roy Cooper has promised to veto the new legislation, which lets the governor appoint all eight members of an expanded elections board — but from lists provided by the two major political parties.
State legislative leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper are likely headed for another veto fight, this time over a measure that would reconfigure the state’s oversight of elections, ethics and lobbying. Lawmakers sent the bill to Cooper’s desk Tuesday. In December 2016 during a special session, state lawmakers approved a proposal to do away with the existing State Board of Elections and replace it with the state’s ethics board, half appointed by the governor and the other half appointed by state lawmakers. That law also gave Republicans control of all local elections boards in each election year. Cooper sued to block the law, saying it violated the separation of powers in the state constitution, and a three-judge panel agreed last month. Senate Bill 68 is an attempt to revive some of that enjoined law, crafted to avoid the constitutional pitfalls that plagued the first version.
The state Senate on Monday night voted not to go along with a House bill that would merge the ethics and elections commissions. Instead, the bill was sent to a conference committee of Senate and House members to work out a compromise. Gov. Roy Cooper said last week he would veto the bill because it curtails voting rights. It also deprives the governor of the power to control the boards through appointments.
The state House on Thursday approved a bill wresting control of elections boards from the political party of the governor. Earlier in the day Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said he would veto the bill if it comes to his desk and sue to block it if necessary. The House vote was 68-42. The proposal is on a fast track, having just been made public Tuesday afternoon – inserted into an unrelated bill so that it could move directly to the full Senate rather than work its way through Senate committees. Senate Bill 68 would merge the State Ethics Board and the State Board of Elections, and evenly divide membership of the new board between Republicans and Democrats. The bill would let the governor appoint all eight members, choosing from lists provided by the each of the major parties.
The state House voted along party lines Thursday to retool a Republican law struck down by a court that combined elections and ethics duties into one board, which its chief proponent says he hopes would settle the matter without legal appeals. But Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who sued over the original law that he argues prevented him from overseeing elections, said he’ll veto the reworked measure if it reaches his desk and threatened legal action again if necessary “to protect the integrity of our electoral system.” The bill “is the latest GOP attempt to curtail voting rights in North Carolina? – and I intend to fight it,” Cooper wrote online hours before the House voted 68-42 for the measure, which now goes to the Senate for consideration, possibly next week.
House Republicans are rushing a bill through the legislature that would aim to salvage last year’s attempt to take away control of elections boards from the political party of the governor. A law passed in a 2016 post-election special session and signed by former Gov. Pat McCrory would have consolidated the state elections and ethics boards and evenly divided membership of the new board between Republicans and Democrats. But a three-judge panel struck down that law last month as an unconstitutional encroachment on executive authority. The 2016 law would have altered a longstanding practice giving a governor the power to appoint three members from his party to preside over elections as well as two members from the other party. Instead, the governor would have appointed four members and legislative leaders would have appointed the other four. In December, incoming Gov. Roy Cooper sued over those provisions, which were aimed at shifting some of the governor’s authority to the state legislature.
A little more than two weeks after a three-judge panel threw out a new state law combining oversight of state elections and ethics enforcement, leading Republican House members are pushing a revised version of the plan. The House Elections and Finance committees on Tuesday approved a committee substitute for Senate Bill 68 less than 18 hours after Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, stripped out the bill’s original half-page of language calling for student attendance recognition programs in local school districts and replaced it with 15 pages of policies and procedures for the proposed Bipartisan State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. Lewis, the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, beat back an effort by Democratic members of the committee to delay voting on the new bill, saying the House needed to take a floor vote on it before lawmakers take time off for Easter late next week.
A federal judge on Monday overturned a legislative redrawing of the Greensboro City Council districts, calling the maps unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles stated in her ruling that the action taken by the Republican-controlled General Assembly in July 2015 established one racially gerrymandered district and unjustly packed too many Democratic-leaning voters into several districts, weakening their overall voting power. The Greensboro redistricting plan was sponsored by Republican Sen. Trudy Wade but she claimed legislative immunity and refused to testify at the trial earlier this year about why she introduced the 2015 plan. It surfaced in the same legislative session that the General Assembly attempted to change election districts for the Wake County commissioners. Both bills drew much criticism and speculation that the changes were power grabs designed to elect more Republicans.
Voters casting ballots for judges next year will know the political parties of the candidates. Republicans who control the General Assembly say that gives voters helpful information. Democrats say it politicizes the courts. House Bill 100 makes Superior Court and District Court elections partisan, completing a change that the legislature began with appellate courts including the state Supreme Court. On Thursday, the state Senate with little discussion overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of HB 100 by a vote of 32-15, with two Republicans voting against the override: Sen. John Alexander of Raleigh and Sen. Danny Earl Britt of Robeson County. The House had voted 77-44 the day before to override the veto. The measure will restore party primaries for trial-court races. Political affiliations will be included on the general-election ballot.
A group of residents have filed a letter with the State Board of Elections asking to change a process that’s used to dispute the validity of someone’s vote. Dozens of people in North Carolina were accused of illegally voting in the 2016 election — either by being a convicted felon who shouldn’t have voted, by voting in multiple states or by another means. Called an election protest, it can be filed by any registered voter or candidate, and simply must be done in writing with the accuser’s name, address, phone number and signature. It also must state the basis for the challenge. Guilford County had nine allegations of people voting in other states, said Charlie Collicutt, Guilford County Board of Elections director. Those protests were dismissed due to lack of evidence. Another eight protests involved allegations of convicted felons who voted, Collicutt said. Four were found to be valid. The other four were not; they involved people convicted of misdemeanors or who had served their sentences and re-registered to vote.
The N.C. General Assembly’s attempt to revamp the state elections board and ethics commission weeks before Democrat Roy Cooper was sworn in as the new governor violates the state Constitution, a three-judge panel ruled on Friday. The judges also found unconstitutional the legislature’s shift of managerial and policy-making employees from former Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration to positions where it’s more difficult to replace them. But the Republican-controlled General Assembly’s attempt to have a say in who joins Cooper’s Cabinet was not found to be a violation of the separation of powers clause in the state Constitution. To date, the state Senate has approved three of the appointments Cooper has made with hearings for others set for next week. The rulings from Superior Court Judges Jesse Caldwell, Todd Burke and Jeff Foster come nearly two weeks after a daylong hearing inside a Campbell University law school courtroom.
Gov. Roy Cooper on Thursday vetoed his first bill, one that would restore partisan judicial elections. The bill’s author said the General Assembly would vote to override the new governor’s first veto. The legislation, House Bill 100, would make District Court and Superior Court judicial candidates go through a party primary. Under the bill, general election ballots would include the candidates’ party affiliations. Candidates who aren’t registered with a political party would need to go through a petition process to get their names on the ballot. Superior Court elections were switched from partisan to nonpartisan in 1996, and state leaders made the same change for District Court in 2001.
The U.S. Supreme Court should dismiss the appeal of a ruling that struck down a North Carolina voting law based on racial bias, the state’s new Democratic attorney general says. Lawyers for Republican lawmakers still want the appeal considered. Attorney General Josh Stein’s office also rejected accusations made by the GOP’s lawyers that he had a conflict that disqualifies him in the matter. Stein was a state senator opposed to the 2013 law and testified in the trial for the groups and voters who challenged the law. It required photo identification to vote in person, reduced the number of early voting days and eliminated same-day registration during the early-vote period.
A N.C. Court of Appeals order means that the state doesn’t have a board that oversees elections and ethics laws, Senate leader Phil Berger said Thursday afternoon. Berger made a rare visit to the room in the Legislative Building reserved for reporters to announce the latest news in an ongoing lawsuit over a December law combining the ethics and elections boards into a new State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. “You still have all of the laws that folks are required to comply with, but we don’t have an Ethics Commission and we don’t have a Board of Elections based on this order,” Berger said.
A bill that would require clerks of court to report to the State Board of Elections the reasons some people have been excused from jury duty has raised concerns from local officials and some senators who worry people could be improperly excluded from voting. Senate Bill 60, which was debated but not voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and a companion measure represent the latest effort to take people who are ineligible to vote off the state’s voters rolls. To demonstrate the need for the measure, Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, pointed to reports out of Ohio that non-citizens may have voted in recent elections. Her proposal is similar to bills that have been filed in prior sessions.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders want the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the new Democratic state attorney general’s bid to dismiss their appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down a voting law based on racial bias. Lawyers the General Assembly hired to defend the 2013 law approved by the GOP objected Monday to Attorney General Josh Stein’s petition last week and want the justices to continue considering their previously filed appeal. They say Stein lacks authority to step in because previous Attorney General Roy Cooper stopped defending the law last summer after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared the law unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit found the law targeted minority voters. The legislature’s private lawyers continued the appeal.
A prominent law firm is disputing the authority of Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein to withdraw a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold North Carolina’s hotly debated voter ID law. An attorney with the Ogletree Deakins law firm contends that the Republican-led General Assembly hired it more than three years ago to defend the controversial measure on behalf of state government. That means the two Democratic officials overstepped their authority this week when they sought to fire the firm and to independently scuttle the appeal of last year’s lower-court ruling that rejected parts of the law as unconstitutional, Raleigh-based lawyer Thomas A. Farr said in a letter.
Gov. Roy Cooper and N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein announced Tuesday that they will no longer appeal a federal appeals court ruling that struck down North Carolina’s sweeping and controversial elections law. In a news release, Cooper and Stein said they were taking steps to withdraw a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory had joined in a petition for the high court to hear the case late last year. The Republican-led State Board of Elections, its individual members and its executive director will remain in the case, according to the news release from the Governor’s Office. But Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the State Board of Elections, said no decision has been made. The board will meet Wednesday and will likely take up the issue. “We need to make it easier for people to exercise their right to vote, not harder, and I will not continue to waste time and money appealing this unconstitutional law,” Cooper said in a statement. “It’s time for North Carolina to stop fighting this unfair, unconstitutional law and work instead to improve equal access for voters.”
The state Supreme Court has restored a block on the legislature’s overhaul of the state elections board and ethics commission while Gov. Roy Cooper’s lawsuit awaits resolution. The court sided with Cooper in an order released Monday. It did not explain its reasoning. The decision is the latest legal twist in a power struggle between Cooper, a Democrat, and the Republicans at the helm of both General Assembly chambers. Cooper sued Phil Berger, the leader of the state Senate, and Tim Moore, the state House speaker, earlier this year over a December law that called for the merger of the five-member elections board and the state Ethics Commission, which administers ethics laws governing lobbyists, elected officials and government employees. At issue is whether the General Assembly overstepped its state constitutional authority when it adopted a law that establishes an eight-member board to oversee elections and consider ethics complaints and issues. The governor would appoint four members and legislative leaders would appoint the other four, with the board split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
Black residents of Jones County, N.C., have struggled for years to ensure local representation, some say, but they hope that a new lawsuit will finally bring results. On Monday, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., joined with two law firms to bring a suit on behalf of black residents of Jones County, N.C. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that the county’s at-large voting system has systematically prevented black residents, who comprise almost one-third of the county, from electing the candidates of their choice to the county’s five-member Board of Commissioners. Since the five candidates receiving the most votes from across the county are elected to the board, the white majority can vote as a bloc to prevent black candidates from winning seats, the plaintiffs say. They argue that this election system has effectively sidelined the black community’s issues, since it is relatively easy to be elected without their votes. Instead, the plaintiffs propose creating single-member local districts, giving predominantly black neighborhoods a higher likelihood of electing their chosen candidate.
In a bid to create a better chance for black residents of rural areas to get elected to local office, a team of civil rights and private lawyers has filed what one prominent civil rights organization calls the first major voting rights lawsuit of the year. Attorneys from from the Washington-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and two private law firms filed the suit Monday in federal court in North Carolina. The suit alleges that the black residents who account for about a third of the population in Jones County, N.C., are prevented from electing candidates who represent their needs because the county elects commissioners at large rather than by district. The complaint alleges the at-large system prevents black residents from electing black candidates from their communities, and says the at-large system dilutes black voting power.
North Carolina’s new Democratic governor and the entrenched Republican-led legislature battled in court on two fronts Friday over efforts to restrict the chief executive’s ability to alter the state’s recent conservative direction. A panel of three state trial court judges spent three hours listening to arguments over whether to continue blocking a law requiring Senate confirmation of Gov. Roy Cooper’s Cabinet secretaries. The judges did not say when they would decide whether to continue blocking the law. Any order would be in effect until after a full hearing next month. Meanwhile, a revamped state elections board met for the first time Friday, hours after an appeals court temporarily reinstated a law stripping Cooper of his oversight of elections. Cooper’s attorneys are asking the state Supreme Court to step in and again block that law. The General Assembly passed the law requiring Senate consent to Cooper’s top appointees in December. It came in a surprise special session barely a week after Republican incumbent Pat McCrory conceded to Cooper in their close gubernatorial race and just before the Democrat took office.
The prospect for new state legislative districts this spring and elections this fall are dimming despite a court order, legal experts say. The situation is just one of several ongoing legal battles surrounding North Carolina elections. An elections schedule ordered by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in November requires new General Assembly districts to be drawn and approved by March 15 followed by a candidate filing period, primaries and a November election. The ruling came after a three-judge panel from the court ruled in August that nine North Carolina state Senate districts and 19 House districts were unconstitutional because they were drawn using race as the predominate factor.
A three-judge state court panel in North Carolina on Tuesday held up part of a new Republican-backed law that strips important power from the newly elected Democratic governor. The ruling, temporarily halting the requirement that the governor seek legislative approval for his cabinet selections, escalated the partisan tensions that have shaken up the state, and came shortly before a scheduled State Senate hearing on one of Gov. Roy Cooper’s cabinet picks. Mr. Cooper has called the law, which was signed in December in the waning days of his Republican predecessor’s tenure, a politically motivated power grab. “The court is absolutely correct in their decision and should not be intimidated by threats from legislative leaders,” Mr. Cooper said in a statement, in which he urged the state “to put these partisan confirmation games behind us.” Passed in the bitter aftermath of November’s election, the limits on Mr. Cooper’s power prompted protests outside the North Carolina Capitol, where Republicans hold majorities in both chambers.
In a blog post and a Slate Magazine column Thursday, election law expert Richard Hasen suggests Gov. Roy Cooper could score a victory for opponents of North Carolina’s voter ID law by scuttling the state’s appeal of a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling striking down the law. That 4th Circuit ruling did away with voter ID rules that were in place for last year’s primary during the November election and forced elections officials to expand early voting times across the state. Former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory appealed the 4th Circuit decision, which struck down much of the 2013 law, including a provision that eliminated same-day registration. Cooper, a Democrat, refused to make the appeal himself when serving as attorney general and took over as governor on Jan. 1. Josh Stein, a Democrat and former state senator, took over as attorney general the same day.
Legislators are expected to revisit election laws this year in the wake of voter-fraud allegations made by former Gov. Pat McCrory’s campaign after the November election. McCrory’s campaign and Republican allies filed protests about voters who they suspected were either dead, serving felony sentences or voted more than once. They also challenged community groups funded by the N.C. Democratic Party that assisted voters with casting absentee ballots.
The U.S. Supreme Court justices offered no clue Thursday as to whether special elections ordered for North Carolina in 2017 will move ahead. The justices went behind closed doors together in the morning. Materials had been distributed to the eight Supreme Court members on the North Carolina redistricting case in which a federal three-judge panel found 28 state House and Senate districts to be unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The justices issued no order – leaving uncertainty about whether the high court would take up the case, and if so how quickly it would be heard and decided. The three-judge panel issued its ruling in August. In November, after voters went to the polls to elect candidates in the districts that had been declared unconstitutional, the judges ordered new maps to be drawn for the 28 flawed districts by March and elections held in any of the altered districts this year.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday put a court-ordered legislative redistricting and 2017 special election on hold while it reviews Republican legislators’ appeal in an ongoing lawsuit. A lower federal court ruled months ago that the current legislative districts are an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and it ordered the General Assembly to draw new districts by March 15 and hold a rare off-year election in altered districts this November. Tuesday’s Supreme Court order puts that order on hold until a Jan. 19 conference among the justices at which they will consider an appeal seeking to keep the current districts in place. From that conference behind closed doors, it could become clearer whether there will be elections held in 2017. The justices could immediately dismiss the appeal and keep the order for new maps and new elections this year. Or they could ask attorneys involved in the case to give them more briefs in the case and set arguments for later in the year, leaving the question of an election this year ambiguous. Since the court is currently missing a ninth justice following Antonin Scalia’s death, a 4-4 decision would keep the lower court’s ruling in place.
A coalition of organizations called again on Wednesday for an independent redistricting process aimed at removing politics from the drawing of legislative and congressional maps in North Carolina. While the effort has failed several times in the past, advocates say the uncertainty surrounding the latest legal complication might lead to more bipartisan support. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted a lower court’s order that the state redraw what it called racially gerrymandered maps and hold new elections in them. For now, that leaves unresolved the question of whether new maps and new elections will be required. A special election would mean some legislators would serve one-year instead of two-year terms.