Democratic lawmaker seeks to give NC elections board power to remove candidates from ballot

A Democratic state lawmaker says he plans to file a bill that would give state elections officials the authority to disqualify presidential candidates from ballots.

Sen. Jay Chaudhuri’s bill would grant the North Carolina State Board of Elections authority to review challenges to the qualifications of candidates under certain sections of the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s critical that our State Board of Elections have the authority to remove a presidential candidate who violates his or her oath to protect, preserve, and defend the United States Constitution,” Chaudhuri, D-Wake, said in a statement Thursday.

The announcement came as the U.S. Supreme Court convened to decide whether states can disqualify presidential candidates from their ballots — an issue that could soon resurface in North Carolina, depending on how the court rules.

The state elections board, in a 4-to-1 vote in December, decided that it lacked that authority when it dismissed a challenge seeking to remove former President Donald Trump from the 2024 Republican primary ballot in North Carolina.

The challenger, retired Stokes County attorney Brian Martin, argued that Trump was disqualified by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which bans anyone who has supported an insurrection against the government from holding federal office.

In dismissing the challenge, the state elections board, which is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans, didn’t rule out the idea of acting on a challenge during the general election. But in primary elections, the state leaders of each political party decide which candidates are approved to appear on their party’s ballot, and four of the five board members agreed they lacked authority to intervene.

Chaudhuri’s bill would explicitly grant the state board “authority to review challenges to the qualifications under the United States Constitution, including but not limited to qualifications found in (i) Section 1 [5] of Article II, Clause 5, (ii) Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and (iii) the Twenty-Second Amendment.”

The measure has support from the national good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and former state Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr.

But it faces strong opposition from Republicans, who control the state legislature.

House Speaker Tim Moore said in an interview Thursday that if Chaudhuri's bill somehow passes the Senate this year, despite that chamber's GOP majority, he'd ensure it goes nowhere in the House. Moore has previously said he plans to file a bill taking the exact opposite stance as Chaudhuri proposed — to explicitly remove the election board's ability to disqualify candidates for partaking in an insurrection against the United States.

"We believe that the voters of this state should have the right to decide who is the president," Moore said Thursday. … "All these allegations against President Trump are just simply that — allegations — with no basis in the truth. There’s been no finding that he’s engaged in insurrection, or anything like that."

A trial in Colorado last year did find that Trump engaged in insurrection and was therefore ineligible to appear on the ballot for president, a decision the state's Supreme Court upheld.

Similar challenges to Trump’s 2024 candidacy have been filed in more than a dozen states, but they have succeeded only in Colorado and Maine. The Colorado challenge was the one before the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday.

The 2024 legislative session isn’t scheduled to begin until April, by which point the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to have made its ruling.

Moore, a Republican who is running for a seat in Congress and has endorsed Trump for president, said he expects the Supreme Court to allow Trump to run for office. But if needed, he said, he will file a bill blocking at least the North Carolina elections board from removing him from the ballot.

“Regardless of who folks want to vote for, they ought to have that choice," he said.