In my years observing politics and hurricanes at The Miami Herald I frequently rewatched the 1948 thriller “Key Largo,” which combined the two subjects in a classic hero-versus-villain story.  The hero, played by Humphrey Bogart, was a decorated World War II veteran. The villain, a mob boss named Johnny Rocco who controlled rackets and local politicians, was played by Edward G. Robinson.

The two were thrown together in a Florida Keys hotel as a killer hurricane bore down and people huddled inside, terrorized by the storm and Rocco’s gun-wielding gangsters. My favorite scene came when Robinson’s Rocco brags of how he bends local government to his malevolent will. 

“I make [politicians] out of whole cloth, just like a tailor makes a suit,” Rocco sneers. “…I get them on the ballot, then after the election we count the votes. And if they don’t turn out right, we recount them. And recount them again. Until they do.”

The North Carolina Republican Party could teach some new tricks to Johnny Rocco.

In recent months, mostly obscured from public view, the GOP has seized control of the state’s election system in ways that would make Rocco envious. Not only has the party shown a propensity to count and count again (Jefferson Griffin vs. Allison Riggs for a state Supreme Court seat), but it has backed that up with legislative and judicial muscle.

This doesn’t just impact what goes on in Raleigh. By the end of June, it will hit with hurricane force in Buncombe and other counties when the GOP completes the process of having placed loyalists in position to oversee the ballot counting in the 2026 elections. 

“When you talk about rigging elections,” Buncombe County Board of Elections chairman Jake Quinn told me as he described all that has occurred in recent months, “the question people will have is how North Carolina became ground zero for doing that.”

How we got to “ground zero” is the story that remains largely untold. 

Here’s a scenario to help picture the situation that awaits us in future elections: Had the state Republican Party had this machinery in place during last year’s judicial elections, Griffin likely would be on the state Supreme Court among an 8-1 Republican majority despite losing by 734 meticulously counted votes to Justice Riggs, a Democrat. 

How? Because a GOP-majority state Board of Elections, backed by a GOP-majority Supreme Court, would have erased the ballots of 66,000 voters – disproportionately Democratic ones – on the tenuous claim they failed to provide appropriate voter ID. 

 The Republican leadership has captured North Carolina’s elections machinery with nary a public outcry, at least not yet. It was orchestrated like a chess game with the different pieces moving in multiple directions at once until checkmate.   

Power shift began in December

The first move occurred in December, six weeks after Democrat Josh Stein won election as governor and the General Assembly – still with the GOP’s veto-proof majority –  was seeking ways to weaken his authority.  

Using a Tropical Storm Helene-relief bill for cover, the Republican leadership rammed through a veto-proof amendment stripping the governor of authority to administer North Carolina’s state and county election boards and appoint their chairmen. 

By statute, each board has five members: two Republicans and two Democrats nominated by their parties, plus the governor’s pick as chairman, typically a fellow party member. With Stein’s victory, the certain result would have been boards with three Democrats and two Republicans.  

For the Republicans to implement the takeover, that law had to change.

Within 24 hours and without legislative deliberation or public input, a new section was tacked on to Senate Bill 382 shifting these election board appointments from Stein to newly elected state Auditor Dave Boliek whose primary qualification for the new assignment appeared to be that he is a Republican who says he was “inspired” by President Trump to run.  

Boliek, an ex-Democrat, is a lawyer and former head of the UNC Board of Trustees who boasts of his efforts to “eliminate woke diversity and equity policies” from the university. But he acknowledges being clueless about how he was gifted this newly found executive power to administer North Carolina elections. 

“It’s not something I asked for; it’s certainly not something that I expected,” he says. 

Despite this utter lack of preparation, Boliek has seized this mantle with zeal. On May 7, a week after the new law took effect, Boliek fired the state elections board’s award-winning executive director Karen Brinson Bell, who had just been elected president of the non-partisan National Elections Association. 

But Brinson Bell had drawn withering fire from Republicans for recommending certification of Riggs’s narrow victory over Griffin. Boliek also appointed two new Republican board members whom the Democratic Party immediately labeled as extremists: retired Marine Corps pilot Francis X. DeLuca and former state Sen. Bob Rucho.

DeLuca formerly headed the arch-conservative Civitas Foundation which, among other initiatives, attempted to eliminate early-voting on Sundays and same-day voter registration, reforms that have increased turnout among low-income voters who tend to support Democratic candidates. 

Rucho earned the dubious nickname “Senator Gerrymander” for crafting a pro-Republican district-election map that one state appellate court said had been drawn with “surgical precision” to ensure GOP control. A determining feature of Rucho’s maps included diluting the collective voting strength of Blacks who tend to vote for Democrats. 

Yet in 2019 his map passed muster with the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark case titled Rucho v. Common Cause. The 5-4 majority conceded that the map was “incompatible with democratic principles.” But Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that such partisan matters as gerrymandering were not within the jurisdiction of federal courts and should be left up to the states. 

So here we are in North Carolina with a gerrymandered General Assembly, a gerrymandered congressional delegation, and the state’s appellate and Supreme Court with lopsided Republican majorities. 

Gov. Stein’s failed attempt to regain administrative authority over the election machinery exemplifies how effectively the GOP can now exercise power. Days after his inauguration, Stein filed suit to strike the section of Senate Bill 382 stripping him of executive authority over elections.

A three-judge panel in Wake County composed of two Republicans and one Democrat heard the case. In a 2-1 decision – the Democrat and one Republican – the court declared the section to be unconstitutional, thus returning authority to the governor.

But Boliek appealed that decision to the state’s Republican-dominated appellate court. The appellate judges reversed the result and gave a green light to the auditor’s takeover.  

Notably, this court’s decision was rendered anonymously and without comment, the judicial equivalent of a back-handed slap at the Wake County district judges. Stein’s appeal to the state Supreme Court, with its 7-2 Republican majority, went unheard and it died in silence. The new law took effect May 1. 

The full impact of this change remains to be felt in Buncombe and the state’s other 99 counties. Boliek has until June 30 to appoint the heads of these county boards and to certify appointments of their members. 

Let me return to Buncombe County Board Chairman Quinn whom I quoted earlier characterizing the state as “ground zero for vote rigging.” As a Democrat, he expects to be ousted from the leadership post and perhaps as a board member, which he admits he will lament. Yet two things trouble him more than his own plight. 

One has been the role that many (though not all) Republican state judges have played in enabling this partisan power grab.

“I have no faith any longer in the North Carolina courts,” Quinn said.  “We’re at a stage where we have to pray for judges to make decisions upholding free and fair elections.”

The second has been that this bulldozing of the elections system has been carried out with hardly any public knowledge or outcry, and deliberately so. “Only election nerds like me know about this,” Quinn said.

Johnny Rocco would applaud.

Asheville Watchdog welcomes thoughtful reader comments on this story, which has been republished on our Facebook page. Please submit your comments there.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Tom Fiedler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter and dean emeritus from Boston University who lives in Asheville. Email him at tfiedler@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

Related