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How much influence did Trump attorney have on NC elections bill? Leaked documents shine a light

The bill largely matches up with the official legislative agenda of a group run by election lawyer Cleta Mitchell. Senate leader Phil Berger says she had no hand in writing the bill.
Posted 2023-06-02T21:31:44+00:00 - Updated 2023-06-03T02:18:06+00:00
How much influence did Trump attorney have on NC elections bill?

A new elections bill, which would make sweeping changes to the voting rules in North Carolina for the 2024 elections, has critics wondering how much influence a controversial right-wing lawyer had in crafting it.

Leaked internal documents, obtained by WRAL News, shine some light on the question.

Cleta Mitchell was one of then-President Donald Trump’s lawyers in 2020, and was heavily involved in efforts to overturn the presidential election results and keep Trump in office despite losing the race. She has since moved to North Carolina. And last week she was at the legislature, meeting with high-ranking Republicans on the elections bill before it became public.

Republican lawmakers have bristled at the idea that she influenced the bill’s contents — prickling at the suggestion they need outside help to write laws, and resistant to having Mitchell’s name associated with this specific proposal.

A main focus of the bill is mail-in voting. It would add new obstacles to people seeking to vote by mail. It would enact an earlier deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive and still be counted. And it would make it easier for people to challenge the validity of others’ mail-in ballots. The bill also would ban outside grant funding for elections and enact more aggressive rules for removing people from the list of registered voters, among other changes.

Republicans say it’s needed to improve confidence in the electoral process after years of skepticism following the 2020 elections. Critics, however, charge that the bill is a GOP attempt to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Senate leader Phil Berger said Thursday that just because legislative leaders met with Mitchell and her allies doesn’t mean they influenced the content of the bill.

When WRAL asked Berger Thursday if he’d be concerned about Mitchell’s involvement changing the public’s perception of the bill, he said: “If it were true, yeah. I understand that she and other people have said some things that folks are concerned about. I can assure that she has not had any role in the drafting of the legislation.”

On Friday, asked about internal documents that seem to show the bill largely matches up with the official legislative agenda for Mitchell’s group, Berger’s office reiterated that she had no hand in writing the bill.

“Not a single word of draft legislation produced by [Mitchell’s group] was used in Senate Bill 747,” said Randy Brechbiel, a Berger spokesman. “The legislation is a product of the bill sponsors based on their ideas for strengthening elections integrity and instilling voter confidence in our system.”

Mitchell leads a group called the Elections Integrity Network, which is focused on a nationwide push to change elections laws — much of it based on her experiences in the 2020 presidential campaign.

WRAL obtained documents purported to have been produced by the group’s North Carolina chapter, called NCEIT, showing its legislative priorities, internal presentations and more. They show the group’s two top legislative priorities for this session include changes to the rules for voter registration and identification, as well as to the rules for mail-in voting. The legislative agenda also specifically says the group “is drafting legislation” for lawmakers’ consideration — although Mitchell herself has since told WRAL that she did not draft any part of the new elections bill filed this week.

A substantial portion of the group’s agenda is in this new bill, but not everything.

Four of the eight changes the group wanted to the rules for voter ID and voter registration don’t appear in the bill at all.

On mail-in voting, it’s a different story: NCEIT wanted nine changes and the bill includes seven of them. And an eighth is already law, although perhaps not as strict as the group had wanted.

Some of the internal documents were provided by the group Documented, a left-leaning investigative journalism project that’s working to shine a light on Mitchell’s continued influence in Republican politics.

Mitchell didn’t respond to an email seeking confirmation of the documents’ authenticity, but WRAL conducted independent interviews with lawmakers, an NCEIT insider and others to corroborate the contents of the documents.

“We are following and looking into the powerful interests that are working to undermine our democracy,” said Lekha Shupek, Documented’s state outreach director. “We think that a lot of the policies being put into place, and a lot of the people doing it, are being funded by wealthy corporations. And we don’t think that’s how it should be done.”

Mitchell told WRAL in a written statement Thursday that she’s always willing to talk with lawmakers about election laws, but she didn’t personally write any of the North Carolina bill.

“I did not help with drafting legislation in any state, including NC,” Mitchell said in the statement. “I have published some provisions for election integrity leaders that I believe, based on my many decades as an election attorney, should be included in every state’s election codes. And I am always happy to serve as a resource for election integrity groups, legislators, citizen volunteers, and election administrators and attorneys.”

Berger said Thursday that situations like this are difficult for lawmakers whose interactions are closely scrutinized.

“Our folks are sort of caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “... If they meet with someone, then all of a sudden you see all this interest in it. If you refuse to meet with someone, they go and tell folks, ‘They won’t even talk to us.’ But I can tell you: she has had no role in the crafting of this legislation.”

Indeed, there’s no apparent evidence that Mitchell wrote the text of the bill. The documents do show that her group got much of what it wanted — sometimes down to the specifics.

For example, NCEIT’s legislative wishlist for this year includes a desire to require elections officials to keep absentee ballot information on hand for 22 months after an election to allow for future challenges targeting the validity of someone’s ballot. The state currently requires some types of information to be kept for four to six months, but the bill would extend each of those deadlines to 22 months.

Some of the group’s other priorities, that are also provisions in the new elections bill, include:

  • People who use same-day voter registration would have to vote using a provisional ballot.
  • Members of the public would be able to inspect mail-in ballot envelopes, and it would become easier for people to formally challenge mail-in ballots to be thrown out.
  • Community advocacy groups would be banned from putting barcodes on absentee ballots, by only allowing government officials to do that.
  • Mail in ballots would have to be thrown away if they arrived after 7:30 p.m. on election night, instead of the state’s current three-day grace period to account for delays in the mail.

Shupeck, Documented outreach director, said the documents show the bill aligns closely with Mitchell’s agenda — and that Mitchell was communicating with legislators about that agenda before the bill was ever shown to the public.

“Cleta Mitchell is someone who tried to overturn a legitimate election,” Shupeck said. “And she is in the room, helping to guide law for how our next elections are run.”

Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, is one of the senior elections officials Mitchell and others met with last week about the bill. He told WRAL Wednesday that she was one of many people he talked to about the bill, and on Thursday he was even more explicit that he didn’t change anything in the bill because of what she had to say.

“She relayed her concerns with election administration in the state of North Carolina, we listened, and we felt like we had addressed what we needed to address in the bill,” Hise said.

Other parts of the group’s agenda don’t appear in this bill—but are in other bills, including the state budget. And the House is still preparing its own slate of election law proposals, which are not yet public.

One big victory Mitchell’s group claimed, the documents show, was over a state budget provision to stop North Carolina’s previously approved plans to join a national elections administration network called ERIC. Supporters of ERIC see it as a way to help improve faith in elections, but Republican critics are concerned that it also focuses on getting more people registered to vote.

GOP lawmakers say the changes are needed to improve voters’ trust in elections. Polls show that conservative voters are particularly distrustful of elections, following Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Elections officials say skepticism persists in North Carolina, even though Republican candidates won most major races in North Carolina in 2020.

Voting rights advocates say that’s a smokescreen. The real motivations, they say, are to make it harder for people to vote, or even force the state to throw legitimate ballots in the trash.

Many of the changes “have nothing to do, in my mind, with making elections secure,” Bob Phillips, executive director of government watchdog government watchdog Common Cause North Carolina, said Friday. “Thousands of ballots — legal, lawfully cast ballots — could be tossed because of the proposals in this bill.”

WRAL Capitol Bureau Chief Laura Leslie contributed to this report.

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