Republican lawmakers in North Carolina on Tuesday enacted major changes to the state’s election laws, triggering immediate legal challenges from Democrats and voting rights groups.
Two new laws – passed in a state that could prove consequential in next year’s presidential election – will change the makeup of state and local election boards, reduce the time to return mail-in ballots and give new powers to partisan poll watchers.
Under the changes, election boards will be evenly divided by party – a move critics say could lead to deadlocks in deciding early voting locations and in certifying election results.
GOP legislators, who hold supermajorities in the North Carolina House and Senate, overrode vetoes by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to enact the measures.
Republicans said the new laws will restore voter confidence in the integrity of elections. In contrast, Democrats said the changes aim to make it harder for voters, especially Democratic-leaning younger and minority voters, to cast their ballots.
Separate lawsuits announced Tuesday by voting rights groups and state and national Democratic parties are challenging a provision in the elections overhaul that singles out the ballots of people who register to vote on the same day they go to the polls during North Carolina’s early-voting window.
Under the new law, election officials must send an address verification notice to those voters. If election officials receive a single “undeliverable” return notice from the US Postal Service, the ballot could be removed from the official count without the voters’ knowledge. The lawsuit contends that the provision could improperly disenfranchise voters if either election officials or postal service workers make errors on the address and could lead to the ballots of college students and others in temporary housing situations being set aside.
Some of the changes to election administration in North Carolina will sideline Cooper.
Traditionally, the governor’s party has held a majority on election boards, which GOP state Sen. Paul Newton, one of the bill’s sponsors, said “allows the party of the governor to manipulate the system.”
The new law, he said during floor debate Tuesday, will make the boards “truly and literally bipartisan.”
Previous GOP efforts to change the state election board’s makeup had been struck down by courts and rejected by voters in a 2018 referendum.
Democratic state Sen. Natalie Murdock said the change “will create chaos and gridlock” in North Carolina elections when election board members reach an impasse. And Cooper has cast the new law as a back-door effort by Republican state legislators to limit early voting.
Under the new law, if the state election board deadlocks on the number and location of early voting sites allowed in a county, the county must default to having just one early-voting site.
“This legislation has nothing to do with election security and everything to do with Republicans keeping and gaining power,” Cooper said in a veto message in August.
The changes enacted Tuesday will also alter other voting procedures, including eliminating a three-day grace period after Election Day to receive most mail-in ballots. In the 2022 midterms, more than 8,600 absentee ballots that arrived within the grace period were accepted, state records show.
Speaking on the House floor, Democratic state Rep. Joe John said counting only ballots received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day could penalize voters for postal delivery delays that are out of their control.
Republican state Sen. Warren Daniel cast the new election rules as “commonsense steps.”
“If you score a touchdown after the buzzer sounds, it doesn’t count,” he said of the hard deadline to receive mailed-in ballots.
The new law also empowers partisan poll observers to “move about the voting place” and listen to “conversations between a voter and election official” at a polling place, which critics argue could lead to some voters feeling intimidated.
This story has been updated with additional information.