Mood of trust, optimism at recent NC election forum

North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) General Counsel Paul Cox and Deputy Director Trena Parker Velez recently spoke in Raleigh with a group of civic leaders on election law and administration.

The talk was part of a larger event sponsored by the R Street and Agora institutes in cooperation with the John Locke Foundation.

The discussion gave an overview of election administration in the state in 2024, what could be done to fix issues that arose, and what to expect for the 2026 and 2028 elections.

voter id

Cox noted that the November general election was the first major election in which the state’s voter ID was in place. Overall, he said things ran smoothly at the 2,600 voting sites across the state, with very few needing to use the reasonable-impediment exception form.

hurricane helene

He also said that they didn’t anticipate Hurricane Helene, which caused catastrophic damage in about a dozen western North Carolina counties, with roads being washed out, no running water for months in places like Asheville, the postal service not being able to operate, and polling places being inoperable or even washed away. And it all happened two weeks before early voting.

“Elections are something that you plan for months; it’s like planning a wedding but planning a wedding in 3,000 different places at one time,” Cox said.

So, even though the board had a plan in place, he said they had to pivot quickly and credited county election board directors and their staff for handling it so well.

After figuring out what the counties needed to open the voting sites, NCSBE also passed a series of flexible reforms to alter the rules so voters could vote in those areas, like using a tent as a polling site. Despite the chaos after the storm, nearly all early voting sites reopened, with the exception of 10 to 15 that didn’t.

trust in elections

When asked about the state of trust in elections in North Carolina, Cox said he doesn’t think that the state is unique when it comes to the subject, which has become more visible since the 2020 election, and that elections are not run that differently from state to state.

“Research backs up how your trust in elections, unfortunately, depends on whether your side won,” he said. “And if you’ve got a very closely divided state, and you’ve got leaders of your party telling you not to trust elections for a number of years and you lose, then you’re going to continue to distrust elections.”

Cox said the NCSBE had a pretty robust public outreach — including website content, mailings, press conferences — in order to counter such distrust, but it’s still hard because the media environment is very partisan and balkanized.

seims system

A question was raised about the status of the Statewide Elections Information Management System (SEIMS) and whether the NCSBE and county boards are still dependent on a computer system from the 1990s.

SEIMS was developed in 1998 and is a central elections management network that coordinates statewide elections processes, voter registration, and reporting of election night and canvassed results.

Parker Velez said they are still utilizing and enhancing it as they don’t have any other option at the moment, but they are working towards modernization with the money that they have been given so far. In addition, she said, new leadership at the NCSBE is exploring new vendor options.

ballots questioned in griffin case and doj lawsuit

Another question had to do with the number of ballots Jefferson Griffin questioned in the race for the state Supreme Court Justice over Allison Riggs, which he conceded in May, and a US Department of Justice lawsuit filed, also in May, against the state and NCSBE.

More than 65,000 ballots were in question in the Griffin case, most of which were tied to overseas voters who provided no photo identification, and a smaller number of “never residents” who had checked a box on a voter form indicating they had never lived in North Carolina or the United States.

At issue in the DOJ lawsuit is the HAVA requirement to include the last four digits of Social Security numbers, or at least driver’s license numbers, for each newly registered voter. The State Board of Elections decided in 2004 not to include the federal requirement on their forms, leading to over 200,000 voter registrations being questioned by a citizen in 2023.

Cox said if all data elements from a first-time voter don’t match up perfectly, like the last four numbers from a social security number, the system gets a mismatch. State law will still allow a person to register and vote, but they have to provide an alternative form of ID before they can vote. At the same time, the system is designed to strip the numbers off the record because they weren’t validated, leaving potentially hundreds of thousands of voters without the numbers in their current record, even though they complied with the law.

He said they are working on a solution for those who didn’t provide the information required by law by contacting them and also identifying those who did.

As far as those on the “never resident” list, Cox said it would be a more complicated issue for the NCSBE because the court said that while they can’t vote in state elections, they can vote in federal elections.

“So, we’re not going to strip them off the rolls, but we’re going to have to figure out a way to give them a new federal ballot or at least instruct the counties to only count those,” he said. “Maybe down the road, create a separate voter registration list, but this is a very small number of people. I also know there’s an interest in the legislature to clean that up so they can’t vote in federal elections either. So it may go away at that point.”

A question was also raised about the retrievability of Election Day ballots for challenges following the Griffin debate.

Cox said if early voting ballots are going to be retrievable, then the rest should be as well because there can be a situation where if people try to challenge specific voters after Election Day, they can only challenge those who voted before Election Day, presenting a “people protection issue.”

optimism for future elections

Despite the challenges associated with a change in leadership on the state board, Cox expressed optimism about future elections in 2026 and 2028.

Cox said he wanted continuity of county boards, with the same leadership they’ve had. He also said there is an opportunity for greater trust in fair elections from conservatives now that they have people administering elections on the state level.

“So, I think there’s an opportunity here to hopefully improve essential trust in elections and bring more people in from both sides of the aisle to be involved in elections,” Cox said. “But obviously it’s a challenge, and we don’t know what’s yet to come.”

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