The first meeting of the new Republican-controlled State Board of Elections quickly turned awkward.
After years of bills, ballot measures, and court battles, Republicans gained a 3-2 advantage on the board in May, retaking the chairmanship and replacing the executive director. The board’s departing Democratic leader had something to say.
“Mr. Chair, may I have a moment to give some remarks?” asked Karen Brinson Bell, the ousted executive director.
Francis De Luca, the newly sworn-in GOP chair, lifted his hand, dismissed the request, ended the meeting, and left the room alongside his GOP colleagues.
The action seemed to set a new tone for the board, which Brinson Bell had led for six years. Now that Republicans have control of not just both chambers of the General Assembly but also the elections board, GOP leaders say they’re preparing to rewrite voting rules and set new procedures in response to what they see as voter integrity issues that the 2024 election brought to light.
“There’s going to be a change, and it’ll be an organic, evolutionary change,” De Luca said after the May 7 meeting.
The recent Supreme Court race has given GOP leaders plenty to work with. Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin sought to overturn a 734-vote loss to Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by removing some 66,000 North Carolinians from the vote count. He alleged those voters had information missing from a voter registration database, had never lived in the state, or hadn’t provided a photo ID as required by law.
While Griffin lost that battle in federal court, Republicans say the problems he flagged are serious, and they are already assessing how best to address them. A new state law shifted elections board appointment powers from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein to Auditor Dave Boliek, giving Republicans control over not only the NCSBE but also all 100 county boards of elections.
“I’m here to make sure that we have secure elections and that we have access for people that are entitled to vote,” Sam Hayes, the NCSBE’s new executive director and a longtime Republican lawyer, said in an interview. “I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”
But Democrats worry about the anticipated changes, including the possibility of tens of thousands of North Carolinians having to update their voter registration forms, several thousand military and overseas voters being required to upload a copy of their photo ID, and hundreds of people who have largely lived outside the country but have been able to cast a ballot in all state races only being permitted to vote in federal contests going forward.
“We’re not dealing with people that have real interest in enfranchising people, which is what I think we should be doing with elections,” said North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton. “Ensuring that every single legal voter in the state of North Carolina is able to access a polling site is exactly what Democrats did last year. Republicans are pissed off because we won elections.”
Brinson Bell has her own concerns about the direction the elections board is heading. The moment the May meeting ended, she took to the mic to offer her farewell, fighting back tears.
“I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence,” Brinson Bell said.
Laying the Groundwork
On election night, Riggs trailed Griffin by several thousand votes. But as election workers continued to count ballots over the next few weeks, the Democrat came out 734 votes ahead.
That’s when the North Carolina Republican Party started laying the legal groundwork for a fight that would drag on for six months.

The party made public records requests from a combination of county elections boards and the State Board of Elections, according to documents The Assembly received from the NCSBE.
The party paid Ryan Bonifay of the Pennsylvania-based political consulting firm ColdSpark $10,000 to review the data, campaign finance records show. He found that more than 60,000 North Carolinians had voted but didn’t have their driver’s license number or last four digits of their Social Security number in the NCSBE’s voter registration database. That information is required to register under federal law. (Bonifay and Griffin declined to comment for this story. Riggs said in a statement that Griffin’s protests have resulted in “immeasurable damage done to our democracy.”)
Pressed for time amid a fast-approaching protest deadline, Griffin initially challenged 60,273 voters with apparently missing registration information; 1,409 military and overseas voters in Guilford County whose absentee ballots weren’t accompanied by a photocopy of a photo ID or Photo ID Exception Form; and 267 North Carolinians across the state who checked a box on a Federal Post Card Application form that read, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.”
He later challenged 4,000 additional voters in three counties as lacking photo ID and argued dozens of other “never residents” should be removed from the count.

In December, the State Board of Elections shot down all of Griffin’s protests, leading him to turn to the courts. The state Supreme Court unanimously rejected Griffin’s challenge against more than 60,000 voters with missing information. But a majority of justices said the “never resident” votes should be tossed, and the military and overseas voters should get 30 days to show photo ID for their ballots to count.
Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers, a Trump appointee, directed the state to certify Riggs as the winner, finding that Griffin was seeking to unjustly change voting rules “after the game is done.” Griffin conceded two days later.
Myers’ order said nothing to prevent the State Board of Elections from changing voting procedures for future elections.
Finger-Pointing
In retrospect, the monthslong Supreme Court election dispute likely could have been avoided, or at least resolved faster.
For one thing, state elections officials—and both political parties—knew there were concerns with some voter registrations well before the 2024 election. In 2023, conservative activist Carol Snow flagged that a state voter registration form appeared to make filling out a voter’s Social Security number or driver’s license number optional, which would violate the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 federal law commonly referred to as HAVA.
The NCSBE corrected that form, but it declined to honor Snow’s request to verify the identity of the estimated 225,000 voters who registered to vote using the unclear form. In a court filing, the NCSBE said Social Security and driver’s license information had been required on a voter registration form until 2009 and “was only changed to imply that the information was not required in 2013, during the McCrory administration.”

The Republican National Committee in 2024 sued to remove those North Carolinians from the voter rolls. But the lawsuit was filed so close to the election that Myers, the same Trump-appointed judge who later sided with Riggs, rejected the complaint.
Griffin’s complaint against 60,273 “incomplete registrants” after the election made nearly identical arguments. Conservative elected officials and legal experts—including Jim Stirling, a research fellow at the John Locke Foundation; Bob Orr, a former state Supreme Court justice; and Senate leader Phil Berger—all said it was Griffin’s weakest argument.
And the list, the NCSBE wrote in an affidavit, was based on a flawed interpretation of state data. The board said it identified 62,027 voters who were missing driver’s license or Social Security numbers in a voter registration database.
But at least 31,167 of them were properly registered, the board said. A more rigorous county-level review would’ve been necessary to determine the eligibility of the nearly 31,000 others. While the NCSBE’s database was flawed, that didn’t mean voters weren’t eligible to cast ballots.
“The fact is we failed to collect this information over time, in violation of the law, and now we’ve got to fix it.”
Sam Hayes, executive director of the NCSBE
The state Supreme Court rejected the GOP’s incomplete registrant protest, though a majority of the justices also cast blame on the state elections board. Its “inattention and failure to dutifully conform its conduct to the law’s requirements is deeply troubling,” they wrote.
Myers, the federal judge, didn’t address the issue of incomplete registration. He instead dealt with Griffin’s other two protest categories.
The dispute over military and overseas voters was also foreseeable months earlier.
The State Board of Elections in 2024 had written rules to implement a new law requiring North Carolinians to show photo ID to vote. An earlier law, unanimously passed in 2011, had set out requirements for overseas voters, and the NCSBE interpreted the two conflicting directives to mean those North Carolinians didn’t need to show ID. An online portal that many military and overseas voters used didn’t even give them the option to upload one.
As The Assembly reported, neither major political party objected to that interpretation of the law until Griffin filed his protest, even though the elections board’s rulemaking was public months before the election.
His challenge focused on just six counties, all predominantly Democratic. In a sign of the rushed process, Griffin’s attorneys wrote in a court filing that those were the counties where “a local election official confirmed that the county board accepted overseas ballots without requiring photo identification.”
Myers, the federal judge who sided with Riggs, said that selective challenge violated the Constitution.
Never Residents
The smallest group of voters challenged were the 267 so-called “never residents.”
Jonathan Marx, an attorney representing the state Republican Party, sent the State Board of Elections a records request on November 12. Two days later, the NCSBE responded with a list of voters who had checked a box on a Federal Post Card Application form that read, “I am a U.S. citizen living outside the country, I have never lived in the United States.”
Griffin challenged those voters as ineligible to vote in North Carolina, and the state appeals court and state Supreme Court agreed with him, directing the board of elections to remove them from the count.
Within 48 hours of the high court’s order, The Assembly reported that some of the 267 people on that list appeared not to belong there. A subsequent Anderson Alerts review identified at least 30 who were wrongly accused of never living in the state. This included 22 people with a history of in-person voting and eight others who were born in North Carolina, resided in North Carolina, still live in North Carolina, or some combination of the three.

Five months after the election, it seemed no one had checked that the people on the list were actually “never residents.”
Democratic Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls told The Assembly she couldn’t comment on court deliberations, but she suggested that Republican justices had taken Griffin’s claims at face value. “There was an assumption,” she said.
Clayton, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said Democrats had prioritized reaching out to the voters in Griffin’s bigger protest categories to make sure they took any steps necessary to validate their ballots.
Matt Mercer, communications director for the NCGOP, wrote on X that the NCSBE was at fault.
“Who runs elections and handles paperwork? It’s not Judge Griffin,” he said. “Any alleged errors fall on the NCSBE and should be made clear.”
“The available record contains sufficient evidence that multiple individuals have been misclassified as Never Residents.”
U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers
Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the NCSBE, clapped back in a statement, saying, “It was the protester, Mr. Griffin, who accused these voters of voting illegally, not the State Board.”
Finger-pointing aside, the Democrat-controlled State Board of Elections cited the reporting of wrongly labeled voters in a federal court filing. The board said it would verify whether the challenged voters were indeed “never residents” and would ask impacted voters to complete an affidavit attesting to their residency, despite the appeals court telling the board to remove the voters from the count.
Myers ultimately held that the state court order to cancel out the “never resident” votes was a violation of their federal due process rights.
“The available record contains sufficient evidence that multiple individuals have been misclassified as Never Residents: perhaps more than 10% of the individuals named in Judge Griffin’s protest,” Myers wrote. “Judge Griffin makes no attempt to counter that evidence.”
Looking Ahead
On May 27, the Trump administration sued the State Board of Elections, urging a federal court to give elections officials 30 days to address and correct missing information in its voter registration database.
The Trump administration’s lawsuit gives more cover to Republican leaders who already wanted to make changes.
Before the suit, new NCSBE executive director Hayes told The Assembly that he was planning to ask Boliek, a Republican, for a comprehensive performance audit. He also said he’d launch a multiyear effort aimed at “modernizing and improving the state’s outdated election management system to enhance the user experience for the county boards of elections and provide greater voter confidence in the system.”
Hayes said after the suit was filed that he planned to contact the U.S. Department of Justice to work toward a resolution.
“The fact is we failed to collect this information over time, in violation of the law, and now we’ve got to fix it,” Hayes said.

Boliek has called for better data-management practices from elections officials. He didn’t respond to an interview request, but the auditor has shared his vision for change.
“In the Griffin-Riggs case, the fact that there are tens of thousands of voter entries on the voter rolls that aren’t complete, to me, is mismanagement,” Boliek told the Carolina Journal last month. “What is the Board of Elections doing when they’re not running elections if they’re not maintaining accurate voter files? That seems to me to be Management 101.”
State elections officials must now brainstorm how best to require and obtain proof of a photo ID from military and overseas voters.
“During the course of this legal argument, you heard from those defending the State Board and on the side of Justice Riggs that, ‘Look, a lot of these people couldn’t provide photo ID. They vote through a portal that doesn’t allow that to happen,’” said Mitch Kokai, senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation. “That’s going to be something that will have to be addressed to ensure that they do comply with the state’s voter ID law.”
To address “never residents,” the NCSBE is working to develop a separate voter roll. State courts have said those voters aren’t eligible to vote in state elections, but they are U.S. citizens who can vote in federal ones. The board will have to maintain a list of “never residents” that is distinct from North Carolina residents who can vote in other races.
Hayes said he’d review a list of 30 people that Griffin wrongly labeled as “never residents” and will ensure every eligible voter can cast a ballot.

De Luca, the NCSBE’s new chair, said he anticipates the State Board of Elections needing guidance from state lawmakers on issues that Griffin’s protest raised.
“The legislature’s going to have to address some questions in terms of the way the ballots are sent out and collected,” De Luca said.
Berger, the top Senate Republican, and House Speaker Destin Hall think the state Supreme Court order is sufficient for the NCSBE to proceed with administrative changes, though they haven’t ruled out future legislation.
“Because of the decision that the Supreme Court made, that, for me, clarified what the law is,” Berger said. “I haven’t talked to anybody with any specific bill or anything, but there probably are some rumblings around about doing something. But I’m not aware and I don’t think it’s necessary.”
Hall recently sounded more open to passing legislation. “I expect that you’ll see us take up some bills dealing with some of those issues,” he said. “All we want, as I’ve said before, is a State Board and executive director of the State Board who will follow the law as this body has passed it.”
Hayes told Spectrum News he expects to see some Griffin-inspired legislation work its way through the General Assembly in an omnibus bill.
Before the Supreme Court race ended, Republicans had already put forward bills to curb voter registration drives and shorten the early voting period. Democrats, meanwhile, want to increase voting access, in part by preventing retroactive challenges to state election law like Griffin’s and by not requiring photo ID for military and overseas voters. None of the bills have had a hearing.
Bryan Anderson is a freelance reporter who most recently covered elections, voting access, and state government for WRAL-TV. He previously reported for the Associated Press and The News & Observer. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.
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