Cooper taps Circosta to fill open seat on elections board

Gov. Roy Cooper named the A.J. Fletcher Foundation's executive director, who served a brief stint on the State Board of Elections last year, back to the board Wednesday afternoon.

Posted 9:21 p.m. Aug 7, 2019 — Updated 8:34 p.m. Aug 8, 2019

Travis Fain

, WRAL statehouse reporter

RALEIGH, N.C. — Gov. Roy Cooper named the A.J. Fletcher Foundation's executive director, who served a brief stint on the State Board of Elections last year, back to the board Wednesday afternoon.

Damon Circosta will replace Robert Cordle, who resigned from the board late last month after telling a crude joke to room full of election officials. This will bring the board back up to five members – two Republicans and three Democrats – and they'll name their own chair.

That person will be the board's fourth chair since early December, when another Cooper appointee resigned the job.

"Every election is important, but there has never been a better time in our state to put voters first," Circosta said in a press release Wednesday. "I appreciate the faith Governor Cooper has put in me to carry out this important role. I look forward to working with the State and County Boards of Elections to ensure elections are secure and that voters have confidence in the process."

Circosta was on a previous iteration of the board in 2018, but that body dissolved as part of a long-running legal battle between Cooper and the General Assembly's Republican majority over board appointments. Republicans bashed the choice Wednesday night, noting Circosta was the board's required unaffiliated voter under it's last iteration. He's a registered Democrat now.

"Gov. Cooper isn’t even pretending that he cares about good government," state Sen. Ralph Hise, who co-chairs the Senate Redistricting and Elections Committee, said in an emailed statement. "By appointing Damon Circosta to the Board today as the tie-breaking Democrat, he’s admitting that his previous appointment of Circosta as an ‘unaffiliated’ member was a sham."

The most pressing issue before the state board now is the certification of new voting equipment, something the board is deadlocked on without a fifth member to break the tie. The board expects to meet Aug. 23, with a decision to be made on whether to require hand-marked paper ballots.

Three systems are up for certification, but one is a touchscreen system that produces paper ballots that record votes via bar codes instead of bubbles that voters fill in themselves. Activists have pushed back against that system, and Circosta's likely will be the deciding vote, determining whether ES&S can sell the product in North Carolina.

It's up to local boards to pick what systems to buy, but they can buy only from the approved list.

The state board may also need to approve early voting plans. County boards generally determine where to put early voting locations and how many to have in a given election, but if they can't come up with a unanimous decision, the plans get kicked up to the state board for the final say.

Wake County approved its early voting plan for the March 2020 primaries unanimously earlier this week.

Legislative Republicans had asked the governor to pick Gerry Cohen for the open position.

Cohen is a long-time Democrat and widely respected attorney who retired after many years on the General Assembly's legal staff. He is now a member of the Wake County Board of Elections, but he was up for the state board job when the board was reconstituted last year.

Circosta got the nod then, too, and his status as an unaffiliated voter fulfilled a now-defunct requirement that at least one board seat be held by someone not registered with either major party.

The A.J. Fletcher Foundation, which Circosta heads, was started by the founder of Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owns WRAL, and Capitol Broadcasting leadership sits on the foundation board.

Circosta also serves as an adjunct instructor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Before joining the Fletcher Foundation, Circosta headed the North Carolina Center for Voter Education, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to helping people participate more fully in democracy.

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