Why NC's budget fight just derailed GOP effort to overhaul elections laws ahead of 2024

A planned vote on sweeping changes to shift power over North Carolina's elections rules to the Republican-controlled legislature was scuttled Tuesday at the last minute — apparent collateral damage in an intra-GOP war over the state budget.

The vote had already been delayed once, last week. Tuesday's delay raised further questions about the 2023 legislative session falling apart due to a fight over whether to legalize casinos. As House and Senate Republicans have increasingly become at odds over the casino debate this month, House Speaker Tim Moore stripped every bill that originated in the Senate from Tuesday's calender and sent his members back home for the next week.

It's not unheard of for one chamber to essentially hold the other chamber's bills hostage as budget negotiating chips. On Tuesday the casualties included SB 749, a controversial elections bill that's a key priority for Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections, and which faces vocal opposition from Democrats and voting rights groups.

Currently the State Board of Elections, ad all 100 county boards, have both Democrats and Republicans — with a 3-2 majority on each board being guaranteed to whichever political party holds the governor's office at the time. SB 749 would upend that system by requiring the boards to have even numbers of Democrats and Republicans.

The bill's supporters say it's needed to force bipartisan compromise on issues like whether to staff early voting sites, whether to disqualify potential candidates or even whether to overturn the results of an election. If a compromise can't be reached, they say, gridlock is better than letting one party decide what the rules should be.

"It requires, in every situation to act, to have at least some bipartisanship to do so," said Rep. Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, a top House Republican leader.

Opponents, however, say it will lead to ties and therefore inaction on key questions. In some cases, the bill would also allow the Republican-led state legislature to step into the void any ties create, and make the decisions on their own — the opposite of the bipartisan approach lawmakers claim is motivating the bill, its critics note.

A key worry is that if Democratic President Joe Biden wins North Carolina next year, a tie over whether to certify his victory would let the GOP-led legislature step in and potentially give North Carolina's Electoral College votes to the Republican presidential nominee instead.

"It's really a transparent power grab," said Ann Webb, the top lawyer for advocacy group Common Cause NC. "It's not moving in the interest of voters. It gives politicians the ability to sacrifice free and fair elections for North Carolinians, in exchange for political gain."

A similar plan to SB 749 passed in 2016 but was later struck down in court as an unconstitutional power grab. Republican lawmakers then tried amending the state constitution to let the plan go into place, but voters rejected that by a large margin in a 2018 referendum. But now, conservative lawmakers are hopeful a new GOP majority on the state Supreme Court will be willing to overturn the past precedent and let the change go into place, should it become law and then face legal challenges.

Republicans didn't push to make the changes in the four years they controlled both the legislature and the governor's office in the mid 2010s. The efforts to remove the governor's influence over elections only began once Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was elected in 2016. But Hall said Tuesday that going forward he'd be in favor of keeping an evenly split board even if a Republican becomes governor in the future.

"It's my opinion that this will actually result in more confidence in our elections," he said.

The top Democrat in the House, Chatham County Rep. Robert Reives, lit into that claim Tuesday. He said no part of state government has done more than the Republican-led legislature in recent years to undermine trust in government and increase partisan toxicity.

"At some point in time, we have to take seriously the responsibility of restoring people's faith in our government," Reives said, urging opposition to the bill. "This is just another way of telling people government doesn't work. This is encouraging it not to work. This is encouraging another debacle."

Another elections bill, also delayed

Leading up to the debate over the bill Tuesday followed by its subsequent delay, the leader of a key elections committee also delayed a different bill, HB 770, that conservative activists have been pushing for.

Despite that delay, many on the GOP's right wing took it as a sign of victory that the bill got a hearing at all. It came as House Speaker Tim Moore has struggled to convince enough conservatives to sign onto a budget plan legalizing casinos.

HB 770 would open up voting records to allow the public to inspect ballots after an election — although with people's identification removed for privacy reasons — so that private citizens could conduct their own election audits on top of the audits the state already does.

Critics had dismissed the idea as being based on the "Big Lie" of unproven election fraud claims by former President Donald Trump, but supporters say more transparency can't be a bad thing.

"Access to voted ballots, post election audits, these sorts of things really build on public confidence," said Jim Womack, who leads the North Carolina chapter of the conservative Election Integrity Network.

The bill even picked up some unexpected support Tuesday from a left-leaning group, Common Cause North Carolina. Although Webb, the group's attorney, had spoken out strongly against SB 749 she said they actually support the broader philosophy behind HB 770 — and hope to work with conservatives on tweaking some of the finer details.

"I hope I'm surprising a few people by saying we're not opposed to this bill, in general concept," said the Common Cause lawyer, Ann Webb. "... There are low-hanging-fruit opportunities to improve our elections audit process."

Despite the bipartisan support from outside groups, HB 770 was not allowed a vote in the committee, after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed a desire to work on changes: "After a lot of comment from you and others, we are not going to have a vote," Rep. Grey Mills, an Iredell County Republican who chairs the House elections committee, announced at the start of Tuesday's meeting.

That wasn't treated as a defeat by the billl's supporters, however. HB 770 was first filed in April and appeared to have been dead almost immediately. So Tuesday's hearing, and the prospect of a future vote, was welcome news to conservatives — who said that they've come up with even more ideas since first filing the bill months ago.

Wilmington Republican Rep. Ted Davis, one of the lead sponsors, said it's possible they could spend the rest of the year working on changes in order to try passing it in early 2024, potentially in time for the changes to be in place for next year's elections.

One of the legislature's more liberal members, Greensboro Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison, also expressed gratitude that HB 770 didn't move forward as planned Tuesday. She had a few critiques of the bill but said she hopes to work with Republicans on making some bipartisan changes — including, she proposed, increased funding for elections administration given the big presidential and other races on the ballot next year.

Rep. Jeff Zenger, R-Forsyth, proposed using the new delay to entirely rewrite the rules for how the state government conducts its own post-election audits.

"It's in all of our best interests to help people understand, or believe, or know, that things have integrity," he said.

Zenger also suggested banning college students from voting in local elections from their campus addresses, such as city council races. Harrison questioned whether that would be legal.