My public comment on the N.C. House elections bill

Most of the bill is ordinary election administration. A few provisions deserve a closer look.

The N.C. House is asking for public comment on the latest version of House Bill 958, the elections bill that has gotten a ton of attention over the past week. So here’s mine.

To start off, this bill is nowhere near as “sweeping” as a lot of the rhetoric would suggest. The word sounds neutral, but it carries a pretty clear implication: Republicans are pushing through a massive, dangerous package of election changes.

I don’t think that’s right.

The vast majority of this bill is pretty innocuous, like bumping up the threshold for filing campaign finance reports a tiny bit, increasing compensation for county board of elections members by a small amount, or creating more training requirements for election officials. There’s also stuff in here that liberals should appreciate, like extending some cure deadlines from three business days to five and making some temporary Class C driver’s licenses valid for voter ID.

That said, there are a few parts of the bill worth debating at greater length and places where the language should be tightened.

Exempt positions are not inherently scandalous

One of the loudest criticisms is that the bill politicizes the State Board of Elections by creating more exempt positions. I think that’s a misreading of what “exempt” employees really are.

State personnel laws have two classes of workers: those covered and those exempt. Covered employees have a ton of protections that make it so they can stay employed even with a changing administration. In a lot of cases, this makes sense. It would be hard to get good civil servants in bureaucratic positions if they were afraid they could get axed every few years.

But a duly chosen executive — or, in this case, the leadership structure responsible for running the agency — should have latitude to put people in leadership positions who can execute the vision for the office.

You can call the alternative a permanent “deep state” if you want, but I think it’s really more of a management issue.

It happens in companies all the time. A new leader comes in, the organization needs to move in a different direction, and there are people inside the building working at cross-purposes with that direction. Not necessarily because they’re bad people. Often they’re not. But those folks can make management difficult.

State personnel laws can do the same thing.

There’s a reason legal, communications, legislative affairs, HR and internal audit roles are different from frontline administrative jobs. Those are positions of trust. They shape the direction and responsiveness of the agency. In most organizations, senior leaders get to have a say over who occupies those roles.

That is not scandalous, and it shouldn’t even really be controversial.

We should also be clear about the scale here. Opponents are talking about this like some huge percentage of the elections staff is being converted into political operatives. The bill deals with seven exempt positions.

Seven.

Pretending seven leadership positions represent some wholesale partisan takeover is not a serious way to talk about the bill.

The post-election audit process is a real improvement

The part I like most is Section 2.10, which creates a new post-election process for identifying invalid votes.

Right now, close elections can get very weird very fast. Legal teams start digging through obituaries and voter files looking for dead people from the other party who cast early or absentee ballots.

Republicans look for dead Democrats. Democrats look for dead Republicans. It’s macabre and gross.

This bill would have boards of elections do basic clean-up work through a more orderly process, outside the normal partisan challenge hunt. That is a much better way to do it.

The process should be uniform, statewide and evidence-based — not a partisan scavenger hunt after a close race. That matters for election integrity, but it also matters for public trust.

The “promoting turnout” language should be tightened

There is one provision I would tighten. The bill says State Board of Elections members and county board members cannot make public statements encouraging or promoting voter turnout in any election.

I understand where this is coming from. Board members should not be partisan actors. They should not be running turnout programs designed to help one party, one candidate or one side of a referendum.

But the language probably goes too far. There is a difference between a board member running a large-scale voter registration or turnout campaign and a board member posting a short Instagram video saying, “Go vote.”

I’d tighten the language to focus on partisan, targeted or organized turnout activity — not generic pro-voting speech. Election officials should not be campaigners. But we should be careful not to make civic participation sound suspicious.

The takeaway

Election law should be boring. It should be clear, enforceable and administered by people who know what they’re doing. The rules should protect every eligible voter’s right to cast a ballot, and they should also protect the public’s confidence that every ballot counted was legally cast.

I think this bill moves us in that direction.

Sure, there are places where the language could be improved. But the loudest version of the criticism treats almost every administrative change as a threat to democracy. I don’t buy that.

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