House Oversight and Reform Co-chair Jake Johnson’s op-ed on the State Board of Elections party-line vote against the Justice For All Party ran in the Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer, and Durham Herald-Sun on July 31, 2024. A federal judge later ruled in favor of the Justice For All Party and the State Board of Elections then voted unanimously to allow Cornell West to appear on the November ballot.
Rep. Johnson explained how members misused the unrepresentative results of a non-random survey to justify their party-line vote.
“The board’s decision on the Justice for All party also was a methodological mess. First, Board staff pulled a random sample of 250 people from this non-random and potentially skewed population for follow-up phone calls, according to board staff. Such a random sample can be unrepresentative, however, and staff did not take any steps to ensure its sample reflected the larger population of those who provided phone numbers, let alone the entire population of petition signers. Although the State Board of Elections has a statistician on staff, that person was not consulted about the validity of this survey methodology.
“Biased sample in hand, staff made one call to each phone number on the list from State Board of Elections phone numbers during business hours between July 9 and 11. Only 49 of the 250 people responded. Again, staff did not consider how those 49 people differed from the 201 people who did not answer or the 5,040 not in the sample or the 11,951 who provided no phone number at all.
“Despite this, board chairman Alan Hirsch and board member Jeff Carmon both said the survey of 49 people was key to their votes against the Justice for All Party.”
Read the whole op-ed:
The House Oversight and Reform Select Committee has called elections officials and an expert to testify before the committee on Tuesday, July 23, at 9 a.m. in the Legislative Building’s Blue Ridge Auditorium.
North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell, Chairman Alan Hirsch, and Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation, are expected to address the board’s decisions on whether to allow three parties’ petitions to be placed on the November ballot. The board ultimately voted to recognize the Constitution Party and the We The People Party but denied the Justice For All Party. The decisions, mostly along party lines, raised questions about how the board made its determinations, any third-party communication related to the issues, and potential political motivation driving the ruling.
“We question the actions of the Board of Elections,” Rep. Jake Johnson (R-Polk) said. “We need answers as to why three parties that had seemingly met the requirements to be on the ballot, were rejected. If this ruling was politically motivated, as is perceived, we owe it to the citizens of North Carolina to bring that to light.”
“How do we trust the board and its staff when their actions seem to be designed to limit ballot access for new parties?” Rep. Harry Warren (R-Rowan) said. “People need to trust the election system. The process to approve new parties this year has done little to foster that trust.”
North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell recently responded on July 26 and July 28 to outstanding questions from her June 22 appearance before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
In Brinson Bell’s responses explaining steps the NCSBE has taken to clean voter rolls, committee staff recognized opportunities for improvement even without joining an interstate group. North Carolina already has data streams that can verify a person’s identity and address. In response to questions on publicly available data, Brinson Bell said the NCSBE already provides a great deal online or through records requests and suggested a new data management system would be needed to make more data easier to access. She also provided committee staff with data to compare all voters with same-day registrations.
Improving Voter Roll Accuracy
Based on its experience in other states Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) Executive Director Shane Hamlin estimated that nearly 600,000 voter registration records could be inaccurate, Rep. Jeff McNeely (R-Iredell) noted at the June hearing. Brinson Bell acknowledged this in her response while providing additional context. Two-thirds of those are people who moved to another county in North Carolina and another group were in-state duplicates. The two groups of problem registrations “would involve corrections to existing voter records, rather than removals of ineligible voters,” Brinson Bell wrote in her July 26 letter.
North Carolinians who die in another state could be another 16,000 problem registrations. Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Nash) had asked about using Social Security Administration death records to identify those people. Brinson Bell explained in her letter that getting access to the data directly from Social Security is cumbersome, but the North Carolina Government Data Analytics Center (GDAC) already receives that information and can make it, and other data sources such as public assistance program enrollment, available to the NCSBE with less hassle. Committee staff are working to connect the two agencies.
Staff asked three additional questions tied to recommendations from the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Although county boards of elections provide voter rolls to courts for jury duty pools, Brinson Bell wrote, “We are not aware of an example” of a court notifying a local board of election when a potential juror is excused for citizenship or residency reasons “ever occurring.” A provision in the recently passed election reform bill (SB747) would require weekly notification and removal of individuals from voter lists for this reason. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, six states permit such sharing. Under California law, “county elections official may contract with a consumer credit reporting agency or its licensees to obtain use of change-of-address data.” Finally, county boards could add a property record search against Register of Deeds and tax records in addition to current matches against the North Carolina Geodetic Survey.
Improving Data Access
Responding to concerns from Rep. John Torbett (R-Gaston), Brinson Bell shared more information on the steps the NCSBE has taken to improve access to and understanding of voter history and voter records data such as updates to the website, presentation of voter registration statistics, voter turnout, election maps, individual voter registration data, voter history data, and frequently asked questions. With 7.3 million registered voters, some of the data files are necessarily large. Committee staff hope to work with NCSBE staff to make more understandable data available and reduce the need for unique public records requests.
Same-day Registration Trends
Brinson Bell provided same-day registration data from the past four statewide elections (2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022). Committee staff compared race, party, and county of same-day registrations against the total electorate in each election. The percentage of voters using same-day registration doubles in presidential years even as total number of voters also increases. Racial composition is relatively consistent over time: black and “undesignated” race voters are a larger share of same-day registration than of total voters, white voters are a much smaller share. Democrats are a consistently larger share of same-day registrants than of total voters, Republicans are a consistently smaller share. Unaffiliateds vary from year to year. Watauga and Jackson counties stood out for the larger share of same-day registrations, which seem to be due to their university populations. Watauga County is home to Boone and Appalachian State University, and Jackson County is home to Cullowhee and Western Carolina University. Consistent differences in same-day registrations suggest a need to expedite the address verification process for those voters.
Brinson Bell’s follow-up responses highlighted opportunities to rely more on data sources the state and local governments have available, including Social Security death records, government program enrollment, jury duty exemptions for citizenship or residence, and property tax records. The NCSBE could also contract with a consumer credit reporting agency or other commercial data warehouse for address confirmation. Many of these actions can be done with existing resources, such as GDAC. Committee staff expect the State Board and its staff to identify any hurdles and provide plans to overcome them, including any legislative fixes.
“If people can’t trust the elections process, how can they trust anything else in government?” House Oversight and Reform Committee Co-Chair Jake Johnson asked before hearing testimony from North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell on June 22.
Brinson Bell told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that the state’s election data and processes are largely trusted and trustworthy, though not perfect. “Trust to me,” she said” is if you don’t believe in the system, you won’t use the system. And we had 75% of our voters turn out in 2020. We had 51% turn out in 2022. These numbers are high compared to other election years. So, when you look at that, our voters do have trust in how we conduct elections in North Carolina.”
Committee members asked about ways to further improve trust, whether reducing the 600,000 potentially out-of-date or inaccurate records, making online data easier to connect and understand, or clarifying ballot processes. Topics included absentee ballots, same-day registration, voter ID implementation, and database management.
Budget concerns were a late addition to the agenda. From 2017 through 2019, Governor Cooper’s budget requests and the budgets passed by the General Assembly were similar in size and priorities. In 2021, the General Assembly chose to set aside $5 million for “mobile voting support” instead of Cooper’s smaller request to upgrade the State Board’s campaign finance software and digitize historical voting data. Despite the lack of funding, Cooper did not make the same requests in 2022. Setting aside the massive influx of federal funds during Covid, appropriations climbed from $6.8 million in fiscal year 207-18 to $8.3 million in fiscal year 2022-23, a 25 percent increase in five years.
Dr. Andy Jackson of the John Locke Foundation, Marian Lewin of the Legal Women Voters, Carolyn Smith of Democracy North Carolina, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) also provided written testimony to address those concerns.
Numbers
Questions from committee members focused on remaining shortcomings, including the accuracy of voter rolls. While those disparities may not result in large numbers, in a close election, they could make the difference between winning and losing.
Rep. Jeff McNeely (R-Iredell) said Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) Executive Director Shane Hamlin said North Carolina could have 600,000 out-of-date or inaccurate records based on experience in other states. Brinson Bell’s presentation showed that 2,151 same-day registrations, either first-time or relocated voters, in 2020 could not be verified.
Chairman Johnson asked about another anomaly of 266 duplicate ballots in 2022. Rep. Maria Cervania (D-Wake) gave Brinson Bell an opportunity to defend the system because the number of problem votes and registrations is a small percentage of the 7.3 million registered voters, or the 3.8 million votes cast.
… our voters do have trust in how we conduct elections in North Carolina.”
Karen Brinson Bell
Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Nash) also raised concern based on a PILF study that found 1,454 voters who were not naturalized citizens were registered in 2014. Asked if there are protocols in place to prevent these errant registrations, Brinson Bell said there is an attestation of citizenship on the registration form.
List Maintenance
Additionally in his series of questions, Chesser asked how voter rolls can be as clean as possible. In response to an example of a registered voter who dies out of state, Brinson Bell acknowledged North Carolina would depend on ad hoc information from the other state. She added that the State Board of Elections is unable to get information such as deaths from the federal Social Security Administration: “We have to be compliant with what they require for security reasons, and we’re not there.”
In his written testimony, Jackson recommended that North Carolina “participate in an appropriate interstate data-sharing program to help identify and remove registrations of people who have permanently moved out of North Carolina or died outside the state.”
Brinson Bell explained to Rep. John Torbett (R-Gaston) how the State Board handles duplicate registrations. It regularly checks names against death and felony reports from other agencies and alerts counties to update their rolls. Even when a voter is marked as “inactive” or “removed” during list maintenance, that voter’s history remains. Brinson Bell conceded that the data are hard for people to understand as seen in the “ginormous increase in public record requests and data requests,” but had no ready answer to improve conformity across data sets.
Upgrading the election management system could provide enhanced security Brinson Bell also emphasized the need for updated software to respond to changing election law and ensure accurate voter lists.
Conclusion
The productive hearing made clear that the voters largely trust the system, and their trust is largely well-placed. Voter ID implementation, earlier deadlines for mail-in ballots, more robust checks on voter registrations, and clearer presentation of online data could all enhance the election system’s integrity and voters’ faith in it.
A transcript of the hearing can be found here.