Claiming to have already trained more than 1,000 people to volunteer to help run this November’s elections, conservative activists in North Carolina are opposing new rules that would more strictly regulate those volunteers’ behavior at polling places.
They won a key victory Thursday — with support from a controversial lawyer heavily involved in the unsuccessful plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election — when a GOP-dominated board voted to block the proposed rules from going into place.
The rules came from the N.C. State Board of Elections and contained many changes governing the behavior of election workers as well as political-party volunteers at polling places. Most were aimed at cutting down on harassment and aggressive political behavior at voting sites — as well as banning poll workers from providing “inaccurate information about the administration of the election.”
Republicans strongly opposed the rules, saying they were overly broad and vague. One such critic is Cleta Mitchell, a 2020 election lawyer for former President Donald Trump who recently moved to Moore County, southwest of Raleigh.
Shortly after she asked the N.C. Rules Review Commission on Thursday to block the proposed rules, the commission voted to do just that, ruling that the elections board lacked the authority to make the changes it wanted.
Mitchell leads a national push to get more conservative activists involved in the inner workings of elections in battleground states like North Carolina, on the premise — with no proof, and shot down in court dozens of times — that the election was stolen from Trump.
“One of the things I can tell you is happening, across the country, is that citizens are becoming aware of their proper role in the conduct of elections,” Mitchell said at Thursday’s meeting. “They’re volunteering to become precinct officials, they’re volunteering to become poll observers.”
She added: “Somehow, that is threatening to the existing bureaucracy.”
Mitchell is perhaps best known for being on the call Trump made to Georgia officials shortly after the 2020 election, pressuring them to “find” enough votes for him to win that state instead of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
She now leads a national group called the Election Integrity Network, The New York Times reported this year, with the goal of recruiting 2022 poll workers and observers from “a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.”
The rule changes North Carolina election leaders had proposed would’ve made it easier for poll workers and observers to be kicked out of polling places this November for spreading misinformation, trying to look at “confidential voter information” or engaging in aggressively political behavior.
Leading Mitchell’s group in North Carolina is Jim Womack, a former Lee County commissioner who has long been involved in statewide Republican Party politics.
Womack said at Thursday’s meeting the Election Integrity Network has already trained more than 1,000 people to serve as poll observers in this November’s midterm election. But if the rules change now, he said, there will be widespread confusion for all of those people. He also voiced concern that the elections board was overstepping its authority.
“These are very sensitive areas, when you’re talking about elections and voting,” he said. “Very sensitive areas. And the impacts are far-reaching across the entire state.”
State officials have been careful to say the new rules weren’t targeting any one group, and that they’ve had issues recently with volunteers from both political parties.
“The State Board concluded, in a unanimous and bipartisan fashion, that these rules were required to provide better guidance immediately to poll workers and partisan observers, to protect the integrity of the voting process,” board spokesman Pat Gannon wrote in an email Thursday.
While the State Board of Elections voted unanimously this summer to pass the rules, the N.C. Rules Review Commission blocked them Thursday in its own unanimous vote.
“It seems the Rules Review Commission is working exactly as intended by the legislature,” said Greg Flynn, a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, in an interview after the vote.
Unlike the elections board, which has three Democrats and two Republicans, the commission’s 10 members are all appointed by the Republican-led General Assembly. Many are GOP insiders or former Republican politicians — including former state Sen. Bob Rucho, former state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson, longtime Jesse Helms staffer Wayne Boyles, Greensboro-based activist Jeffrey Hyde and several conservative lawyers from the Raleigh area.
Even before losing in 2020, Trump was fond of spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud, including about North Carolina — a state he said Barack Obama won in 2008 because of immigrants voting illegally, a claim PolitiFactNC noted was not only wrong but also mathematically impossible.
And as his unproven fraud claims ramped up following his 2020 defeat, they remained popular among many GOP leaders in North Carolina.
Last year a group of Republican state lawmakers tried to seize Durham County voting machines in an effort to conduct what they called an inspection, separate from the election audits that the state already conducts after every election. Elections officials refused, saying it would be unlawful to continue using voting machines that politicians had tampered with.
In Congress, seven of North Carolina’s eight Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Jan. 6, 2021, against certifying results of the 2020 election. Neither Sen. Richard Burr nor Sen. Thom Tillis, both Republicans, voted to overturn any state’s results. Burr is not seeking reelection this year, and the Republican nominee to replace him in November is Rep. Ted Budd, who did vote to overturn 2020 results and was later endorsed by Trump for Burr’s seat. Mitchell recently was scheduled to hold a fundraiser for Budd.
Looking beyond this year, state law says the majority on the five-member N.C. State Board of Elections goes to whichever political party the governor belongs to. So the 2024 governor’s race will determine who’s in charge of making election rules until at least 2029.
With Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper term-limited and unable to run again, Womack said he’s hopeful for a Republican takeover, and to rewrite many of the state’s election rules.
“The entire ruleset needs an overhaul,” he wrote in an email Thursday. “Perhaps when Governor Cooper sails into the sunset in 2025 we will source a new set of public servants to produce adequate rules for conducting elections in North Carolina.”
The vote Thursday blocked two new rules from going into effect. One was for poll workers, and the other for what are known as election observers.
Observers are official volunteers for a political party, like the ones Mitchell and Womack are helping train for the GOP, who are authorized to watch inside polling places to make sure nothing improper happens.
Each rule contained numerous new requirements and restrictions for both observers and poll workers. Opponents said they were too vague and broad, and could lead to people getting kicked out of polling places over minor issues or nothing at all. Supporters said they’re necessary to stop a growing trend of attempts to interfere in elections, intimidate voters and spread misinformation.
Some of the proposed changes included:
—Poll workers could be removed from duty for making political statements, telling voters falsehoods about how elections are run, or discriminating against voters based on their race, gender or other characteristics.
—Observers would have to stay in specific areas at each polling place. State officials indicated this was to stop them from leaving to make private calls to party officials, getting into altercations with voters, or attempting to look at “confidential voter information” like someone’s filled-out ballot — all actions that drew complaints during the primary election this spring.
—Observers would be banned from handing out any written materials to voters, or posting any fliers or signs. Campaign volunteers are allowed to do that nearby, but never inside the polling place.
Flynn, the Raleigh-area elections board member, said he agrees with state officials that those rules would help cut down on the problems they all saw in this spring’s primary elections and are expecting to get even worse in November. More people are showing up as observers than ever before, he said, and they’re acting increasingly aggressive.
“It can get kind of jittery,” he said. “And then you add all the extra tension we’ve had since 2020.”
The state elections board could appeal Thursday’s decision and try to convince a court to implement the new rules, despite the objections from the Rules Review Commission. The board didn’t immediately decide if it would appeal.
