The North Carolina Republican-controlled legislature is attempting to pass a sweeping bill — a power grab tucked inside a hurricane relief bill — in a blatant attempt to shift power away from newly elected statewide Democrats just weeks before Republicans lose their supermajority in the state General Assembly.
The legislation, SB 382, was fast-tracked this week just as Republicans are about to lose their veto-proof supermajority. The bill allocates funds to Hurricane Helene relief, but also explicitly weakens the authority of incoming Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and Democratic Attorney General Jeff Jackson. Democratic officials sharply condemned the move in posts on social media this week.
Stein described the bill as evidence “Republicans in the General Assembly are grabbing power and exacting political retribution,” he said in a post on X on Tuesday. Current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said on X that GOP legislators “used financial crumbs to cover for massive power grabs.”
The bill, which passed along party lines in both the state House and Senate this week, would give the newly elected Republican state auditor Dave Boliek, and not the governor, authority over the five-member state election board. As it stands now, according to North Carolina state law, the governor has the authority to appoint members to the state election board.
Conveniently, Boliek is the first Republican to hold the state auditor position in North Carolina since 2009. No other state auditor has authority over elections.
David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, emphasized to TPM that he is not aware of “any state in American History that has given this important authority to a state auditor’s office.”
“Primarily it’s a party that is upset about the outcome of an election and knowing that they have lost the supermajority in one chamber and having to do their dirty work before the end of the year,” Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, told TPM.
If signed into law, the bill would also prohibit the attorney general from taking any positions that are contrary to the general assembly.
“The people of North Carolina certainly didn’t elect the Attorney General just to do the legislature’s bidding for them,” Liz Barber, policy director of the North Carolina ACLU similarly told TPM.
And, of particular concern to election administration, the bill would compress the timeframe for county boards of elections to tabulate provisional ballots, absentee ballots, as well as shorten the amount of time a voter has to cure a ballot. These provisions would make it significantly harder for election administrators at the county level to do their jobs and manage these new time constraints.
“It’s really egregious for a 130-plus page bill that has sweeping consequences across pretty much every branch of government in North Carolina,” Barber added. “And it’s undemocratic in substance because it is a huge power grab from the legislature, taking the powers away from duly elected officials.”
The draft of the bill was not even made public until Tuesday morning, Democratic State Rep. Pricey Harrison told TPM. She called the attempt to pass this bill under the “guise” of hurricane relief “super misleading.”
“We were warned they were going to take powers from the governor, they were going to take powers from the Attorney General, they’re going to take powers from the superintendent of public instructions because those are democratic hands,” she said. “So we were expecting this, but we didn’t expect them to dump this all into one bill.”
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has ten days to sign the legislation into law, but he is, of course, expected to veto the measure.
But the Republican-controlled legislature will have its supermajority until December 31, meaning they will have time to override any Cooper veto before the end of the year.
There is no reason to expect North Caroline Republicans won’t use their supermajority to push through the 11th hour legislation. They’ve been blatant about using whatever means necessary to push through the power grab, including, reportedly, considering getting the Republican lieutenant governor to sign the bill into law while Cooper was out of the state Wednesday.
Republican Lt. Governor Mark Robinson — a man with a long history of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ views, who lost his bid for governor in the wake of reports that he once made racist comments on a porn website — was serving as acting governor while Cooper was out of state in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. Robinson reportedly considered signing the bill in Cooper’s absence after it passed the state legislature Wednesday afternoon. But the legality of this maneuver was unclear, and Robinson ultimately backed down.
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