Gavel (Photo: Shutterstock)
The North Carolina Appeals Court has cemented the state legislature's "power grab" over elections, taking control from the State Board of Elections and handing it to Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek a local reporter said.
WRAL reporter Will Doran said on X on Wednesday that the court said that since the legislature didn't hand power to itself, it was a legal move. Doran noted that elections will be run by someone other than the executive branch "for the first time in 125 years."
The 51-page order walks through the 2-1 party-line vote and said that the legislature didn't violate the North Carolina Constitution’s separation of powers clause by taking away executive authority
The News & Observer reported that the judges did acknowledge that it "resulted in a partisan shift."
After the 2024 election, the legislature changed the law that allowed the governor to appoint members to the State Board of Elections to the lower-level state auditor post. Voters were angry because they cast ballots without knowing that the new auditor would control the elections board.
All 100 county election boards will also now be controlled by the far-right auditor. It means that the elections board has gone "from having a 3-2 Democratic majority to now having a 3-2 Republican majority," WRAL reported.
Democrats believe that it's part of an effort involving the GOP's efforts to overturn the results of a still-uncalled election for the state Supreme Court last year. The current board of elections is fighting not to have thousands of ballots thrown out. The new board, however, could eliminate ballots that supported Democrat Allison Riggs' candidacy.
"I fear that this decision is the latest step in the partisan effort to steal a seat on the Supreme Court," Gov. Josh Stein (D) said in a statement on Wednesday after the ruling. "No emergency exists that can justify the Court of Appeals’ decision to interject itself at this point. The only plausible explanation is to permit [Boliek] to appoint a new State Board of Elections that will try to overturn the results of the Supreme Court race."
The appeals court attempted to keep the identity of who voted for and against the ruling a secret, but Republican Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin's spokesman revealed he wasn't one of the judges who issued the ruling. Griffin still sits on the Court of Appeals while his election lawsuit continues to play out.
WRAL also clarified, "Republican lawmakers have been trying to take elections power away from the governor's office ever since Democrat Roy Cooper unseated former Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, in 2016."
Semafor reporter David Weigel commented that the ruling is "One of the funniest power grab stories. Why give the elections power to state auditor, which never handled them before, and not secretary of state? Because NC Dems narrowly held SecState but narrowly lost the auditor race."