Upon further review: Commission finds that NC elections suffer from deficits and distrust
by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press February 10, 2025
James Hardaway spent Election Night counting ballots in Wake County. With another poll worker standing behind him as a second pair of eyes, Hardaway physically checked each paper ballot, ensuring that the numbers matched those the precinct’s tabulators had been tracking all day and night. In other elections across North Carolina, similar scenes were playing out.
Afterwards, the Wake County precinct workers knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the numbers aligned, Hardaway said.
But not everyone shared that knowledge.
“That’s not good enough for someone who’s reading something on Facebook or Twitter that there are 500,000 voted ballots that are only voting for one candidate,” Hardaway said. “If you look at the raw numbers, that’s not true. But when that post gets a million views, it gets legs.”
Last week, the commission met at Catawba College to discuss its findings and recommendations after a multi-year effort. While the commission’s 11 committees covered a wide range of election topics, they arrived at two major conclusions.
First, North Carolina’s elections need more funding to operate effectively.
Second: North Carolinians do not know or understand the state’s electoral processes enough, which leads to confusion, distrust and apathy.
‘Nobody’s done this’
The Commission on the Future of North Carolina Elections launched in October 2023 with a mission: increase confidence and trust in the state’s electoral process through comprehensive review. Members came from across the state and varied in age, race, gender and political affiliation.
The commission originated from an organization called the North Carolina Network for Fair, Safe and Secure Elections and counts Catawba College as a partner in the effort.
It’s led by a bipartisan pair: former Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, a Democrat, and Bob Orr, a former state Supreme Court justice who had been a longtime Republican.
Since its inception, the commission’s 11 committees have held over 80 meetings to discuss and debate various aspects of the state’s electoral process.
The commission’s bipartisan committees looked into, among other things, North Carolina’s ballot security, election infrastructure and administration, campaign finance and voter access.
“Nobody’s done this,” Orr said. “As critical as elections are to democracy, to our state, I’m not aware of any governmental units or academic entities that have done the kind of comprehensive work that this group has.”
Voters lack trust in the elections process
For the most part, North Carolinians’ trust in elections depends on whether their preferred party wins. That’s according to a pair of surveys conducted in August 2024 and January 2025 by YouGov, a British market research company.
Over 1,000 North Carolinians were asked how confident they were in the security and integrity of North Carolina voting before — and after — the 2024 election.
In August, 71% said they believed in the voting process with Democrats expressing significantly higher confidence than Republicans — 83% to 63%.
However, after President Donald Trump won reelection, those numbers changed for members of both parties. Overall confidence rose to 80%. But Republicans’ confidence in election integrity spiked to 86% while that number for Democrats dropped slightly to 81%.
There was a starker partisan divide when respondents were asked if they thought that votes in their county would be accurately counted.
Before the election, 89% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans said they thought that the votes would be correctly tallied. But afterwards, only 75% of Democrats felt that way. The confidence of Republicans, however, skyrocketed to 86%.
Hardaway said his committee found that the doubts of voters stems from a lack of understanding. They don’t know how election technology works. They don’t trust that the ballot’s path from printing to counting is secure each step of the way. And they want more proof that voter rolls are accurate and regularly maintained.
While a great deal of information on these processes already exists publicly, in places like the State Board of Elections’ website, there’s a need to more aggressively advertise and spread the knowledge among the electorate, the committee found.
“More communication and more information is ultimately going to build confidence in the process,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
The civics education we’re missing
While there are legislative efforts to bolster civic education — including a bill introduced this session requiring UNC System institutions to require at least three credit hours in American history or government to graduate — they often focus on specific historical documents, such as the Gettysburg Address or Federalist Papers.
But there’s not much that teaches young people on how localities prepare and run elections.
Martha Kropf, a UNC-Charlotte political science professor, told the commission she once asked her college class a series of basic questions to gauge their election knowledge. Among them: Can a felon vote?
The correct answer is yes — once they’ve served their sentence, completed probation and paid any restitution.
But only 18% of her students got it right. Some were even insistent that Kropf was wrong.
The commission discussed trying to get more basic election knowledge into this session’s bill.
Civic education requires civic engagement
People who start voting at 18 tend to make civic involvement a habit throughout their life, Catawba College political science professor MichaelBitzer said.
But the opposite is also true.
“If you get later into your life and haven’t participated or haven’t cast ballots, it’s perceivably harder to get people engaged and into a mindset of being civically engaged,” Bitzer explained.
The committee devoted to civic education found that most county election offices who responded to their survey did not have someone on staff whose job description included voter education.
Some advocated for paying non-voters, particularly those who are younger or in marginalized communities, to participate in research on what civic engagement barriers they face. Many brought up social media as a necessary tool to reach less civically-engaged North Carolinians.
Whatever the solution may be, Bitzer said it will have to start small.
“Everything in American history teaches us that oftentimes things that are fundamentally shifting … begin at the local level,” he said.
Elections and their cost
The commission noted that one area in dire need of investment is campaign finance.
Each election cycle, over 3,317 political entities are legally required to file campaign finance reports. Most have to file more than one during each cycle.
Two attorneys, six to seven auditors and one to two investigators are responsible for policing all of those reports with software that’s over 20 years old.
A commission committee found that hiring at least two more auditors, in addition to investing in modern-day software, would better hold candidates and campaign finance organizations more accountable in a timely manner.
Understaffing and outdated technology underscore the challenges. Last December, a three-plus year investigation into campaign finance violations committed during Mark Robinson’s run for lieutenant governor finally concluded.
Poll position
Funding is also needed to address critical personnel challenges in several areas of election administration, the commission found.
In the past five years, election directors in 61 of North Carolina’s 100 counties have left their jobs. A Carolina Public Press investigation found that safety concerns, increasing complexity of the job as voter policies constantly change and low pay were behind the exodus.
Minimum pay for election directors was set at $12 an hour in 1999 and hasn’t increased since.
Their responsibilities have increased exponentially since then. And now, with the passage of Senate Bill 382, they will face tighter deadlines to count provisional and absentee ballots after elections.
In addition to election directors, the supply of poll workers is suffering from a lack of funding. In 2022, 48% of North Carolina jurisdictions reported difficulty recruiting workers.
To combat that, election administrators will have to get more creative, said Leslie Garvin, executive director of an organization called North Carolina Campus Engagement.
“Has anybody seen a commercial to recruit you as a poll worker or an ad on social media or something?” she asked. “We’ve got so much access to folks now, and we need to use that.”
Where do elections go from here?
While last Tuesday was the unofficial “graduation” of the Commission on the Future of North Carolina Elections, the work is far from over.
By its bipartisan nature, the commission did not reach a consensus on every issue and recommended some things for further study.
Within the next month or so, the group will present its findings and recommendations to the legislature.
In October 2023, the commission set out to answer one question, Bitzer recalled: “Can we, with confidence, say to our fellow citizens in this state that North Carolina’s election system is fair, safe and secure? Is it a good system?
www.thecentersquare.com – By Alan Wooten | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-03-24 14:48:00
(The Center Square) – Citing national security, foreign influence on higher education in America and transparency, a report from Americans for Public Trust says a North Carolina private university received more than $94.1 million in foreign money last year.
Duke University, in Durham, was only behind Cincinnati ($237.1 million), Cornell ($203.8 million), Harvard ($150.1 million), Stanford ($125.9 million), Juilliard ($119.9 million), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($106 million) and Texas A&M ($102 million). Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit report author, said elected leaders need to “crack down on reporting lapses” at the institutions,
“For far too long, a staggering amount of foreign money has flowed into our colleges and universities with little to no transparency or oversight,” Sutherland said in a release. “Much of these foreign funds can be traced back to countries that have well-established adversarial relationships with the United States or engage in direct or indirect malign activities against our country. It is no coincidence that, in the same time period, we’ve seen a rise in anti-American demonstrations and radical ideas being cultivated at these institutions.”
The DETERRENT Act, shepherded in the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington, is billed as “defending education transparency and ending rogue regimes engaging in nefarious transactions.” It expands oversight and disclosure requirements related to foreign sources and institutions of higher education.
The bill was filed Feb. 15 and includes reporting to the Department of Education. Since then, President Donald Trump has called for the elimination of the department though not all its activities. Those, such as Pell Grants, would be transferred to another oversight authority.
Foreign gifts and contracts exceeding $250,000 to American colleges and universities must be disclosed, per federal law. Americans for Public Trust says “fewer than 300 of the approximately 6,000 U.S. institutions self-report foreign money each year.”
The nonprofit accuses “bad actors” of using “foreign funding to influence research, campus policies, and the curriculum to push anti-American narratives.” It further said, “some of the largest foreign contributors to U.S. schools include countries with histories of espionage, intellectual property theft, and efforts to sow discord in America.”
by Sarah Michels, Carolina Public Press March 24, 2025
North Carolina voters are partial to purple — in a political sense, at least. In last year’s statewide elections, they opted for six Democratic and eight Republican outcomes. While Republican President Donald Trump carried the state by three points, voters also chose Democrats Josh Stein for governor and Jeff Jackson as attorney general. Republicans and Democrats also split victory spoils in Council of State and statewide judicial races. In fact, no state was more split than North Carolina.
Split-ticket voting, or choosing different parties for different offices, is not a new trend in North Carolina. In the past half century, voters have chosen a governor of one party and a president of another in eight of 13 elections as well as different parties for senator and governor in six of eight elections.
But in an increasingly nationalized political scene, the purple pattern gets more peculiar.
“It seems like North Carolina is the exception to the rule,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “Almost everywhere else in America, there’s no ticket splitting.”
Split decisions
In a sense, the impetus of North Carolina’s ticket-splitting culture may be geography.
As a peripheral southern state, North Carolina has found itself caught between the political ideologies of the North and South throughout history, Cooper said.
“The South was overwhelmingly Democratic,” he explained. “We were not as Democratic as our southern neighbors, and when the South went overwhelmingly Republican, we didn’t go quite as Republican as our neighbors. We’re sort of sitting somewhere in the middle.”
After the South switched to Republican support, rural North Carolina Democrats held on to power in some offices. But that’s also changed. Now, rural North Carolinians tend to vote Republican while urban voters lean Democratic.
While the environment that originally allowed the state’s ticket-splitting culture to develop is history, there are several newer factors that continue the trend.
For one, North Carolina is among the fastest-growing states, with steady growth since the 1990s, Carolina Demography Director Nathan Dollar said. Most of that growth comes from people moving to North Carolina from other states and countries — 47% of the population was born out of state, including a 9.3% foreign-born population.
They come here largely from Florida, New York and South Carolina, Dollar said, and tend to gravitate towards urban areas. They include younger people, who are more likely to register unaffiliated, and older, wealthy retirees. And they naturally bring different cultural norms and political ideologies with them.
Those moving to North Carolina for jobs may have more formal education, which is sometimes a trait of split-ticket voters, according to Cooper. But besides that, he said there doesn’t seem to be any major demographic patterns of split-ticket voters.
Republican state Rep. Harry Warren sees the impacts of growth in his Rowan County district, which has a history of Scottish and Irish immigration.
“You have people from different nationalities that came into the state and are bringing with them their personal histories and experiences,” Warren said. “And I think it’s just a carryover generationally, as people pass down their values and their beliefs from one generation to the next.”
One of the biggest stories in state politics — and a significant contributor to North Carolina being purple — is the rise of unaffiliated voters. Since Republicans opened their primaries to unaffiliated voters in 1988, unaffiliated registration has steadily increased (Democrats subsequently opened their primaries in 1996).
“I think that probably leads to a little bit more ticket splitting as well because these are people that are not moored to a party in the way that a registered Democrat or registered Republican might be,” Cooper said.
In 2018, unaffiliated voter registration surpassed Republican registration; it later overtook Democratic registration in 2022. Now, 38% of registered voters are unaffiliated. These unaffiliated voters are disproportionately younger and from out-of-state. Warren said that likely reinforces the purpleness of the state.
North Carolinians’ desire to vote in a more purple way led to the elimination of the straight ticket option in a 2013 election omnibus bill sponsored by Warren. Eliminating the option meant that North Carolina voters could no longer check a box at the top of their ballots to automatically vote for all the Democratic or Republican candidates; they had to fill out each race separately.
“It encourages people then to go out and learn about the candidates and evaluate the candidates on the basis of their policies and what they’re proposing, rather than just arbitrarily voting for a party right down the line,” Warren said.
A ‘blue dot in a red city’
Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers is a Democrat, but he’s “not one of those,” according to his majority Republican constituents.
Growing up with a father and grandfather heavily involved in politics, Smathers was taught to qualify his Democratic identity; he was a “North Carolina Democrat” or a “Jim Hunt Democrat.” That is to say, more moderate than the national Democratic Party.
While most Canton elections are technically nonpartisan, with no “D” or “R” next to candidates’ names, Smathers is a “blue dot in a red city.” Republicans hold every seat on the Haywood County Board of Commissioners and Canton went for Trump by a 34-point margin in the 2024 election.
But no Republican challenged Smathers in his 2017 and 2021 mayoral races.
That makes sense to Smathers; so much of local government is practical leadership, or “getting things done.” People judge him and his team based on their accomplishments, not their party affiliation.
In Canton, that’s meant leading the community through the aftermath of 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred, a subsequent paper mill closure and, now, Helene recovery.
After Helene hit, there was a decision made among local leaders, Smathers recalled.
“We knew how toxic the political climate was, and so it’s not saying everyone always agrees, but all of us have made a really strong effort to make this bipartisan in some regards,” Smathers said. “We want that to be one of the lasting legacies of all these crises that we have faced in Canton.”
North Carolinians often split their ticket along federal and state lines. That tracks for Smathers.
If he ever gets criticized, it’s usually for something the national Democratic Party did, he said.
“I think out here, even ones who didn’t vote for him, I think people respect (former Democratic Gov.) Roy Cooper, I think people are thinking Josh Stein’s doing a good job…They view myself, people like Gov. Stein, differently than people at the national level.”
Democracy at work
States like North Carolina tend to get a lot of attention — in the form of candidate visits and ad spending — during presidential election years. In the past three presidential elections, North Carolina has been among the top three most-visited states.
Does that translate to special political favors from national politicians? Not really, Western Carolina’s Cooper said.
However, being a split-ticket state does have some other political reverberations. It forces candidates running for statewide office to make broader appeals to a more diverse electorate, Warren said.
And it pushes people like Stein, faced with a majority Republican legislature, to include and acknowledge the GOP in task forces and speeches.
But while splitting the ticket may appear to encourage politicians to reach across the aisle, at least rhetorically, it doesn’t necessarily lead to more moderate policy, Western Carolina’s Cooper said.
“In a close state, when you get power, you try to use it quickly, and so they tend to act with haste more often,” he said. “So actually you see, in some ways, less moderate actions in closer states because they know they have to act right then or else they might lose power.”
This session’s Senate Bill 58 is a prime example of that type of policy, according to Democracy NC Policy Director Katelin Kaiser.
Senate Bill 58, presented by a Republican-led legislature, would bar the attorney general, a newly-elected Democrat, from filing litigation against any presidential executive order.
Kaiser sees the move as trying to “undermine certain choices of voters.”
“Seeing split tickets in North Carolina, that is North Carolinians’ choice to be able to have and decide,” she said. “And so if they want a Republican president and they want a Democratic attorney general, that is, I think … democracy working.”
SUMMARY: North Carolina’s new State Treasurer, Brad Brer, aims to make the state pension plan more aggressive to achieve higher returns, comparing the current investment strategy to driving too slowly. He suggests potentially investing in assets like Bitcoin, albeit cautiously, starting with a very small percentage despite legislative allowance for up to 10%. Brer also faces a significant deficit in the State Health Plan. His proposed solutions include seeking more funding from lawmakers and implementing a sliding scale for premium increases. He also intends to reinstate coverage for weight loss drugs, viewing them as a long-term cost-saving measure. While acknowledging the need for legislative cooperation, Brer believes his role is largely non-political.
North Carolina State Treasurer Brad Briner left a career in high finance to pursue one of the highest-pressure roles in state government. Briner oversees the state pension plan and the state health plan, which serve hundreds of thousands state government employees, retirees and their families. Briner recently spoke with WRAL’s Dan Haggerty about everything from investment strategies to coverage of weight-loss drugs. Haggerty offers highlights from their wide-ranging conversation.
