Hearing shows 'election integrity' is mere slogan to legislative leaders

Published July 25, 2024

When it comes to actual election integrity, talk is cheap when listening to the leaders of North Carolina’s legislature.

They’re all for redundant demands that voters must affirm their citizenship, and oppressive legislation aimed at narrowing opportunities for votes to cast ballots and enacting oppressively strict regulations for people voting absentee.

But when the State Board of Elections actually does seek to make sure those who say they are voters, are in fact, properly qualified and registered, legislative leaders complain.

Tuesday, the state House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee grilled state Board of Elections staff and the chair Alan Hirsch, a Democrat. The committee, like the entire House, is heavily dominated by Republicans.

It was a scene that might emulate the famous moment in the classic 1942 movie “Casablanca” when Captain Renault (played by Claude Reines) orders his officer to “round up the usual suspects” to make quick and superficial work of a shooting.

The State Board of Elections denied Cornell West’s “Justice for All” political party a presidential candidate slot on the November ballot. It did so after both checking a random sample of people whose signatures appeared on petitions to get West on the ballot and finding 60% said they’d not been fully told the details and significance of what they signed or even didn't recall signing at all. Documents later tied the signature-harvesting efforts to a Republican political consulting firm. Political and election analysts have predicted that West’s appearance on the state ballot would likely take votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.

The board DID vote to allow ballot access to the Constitution Party as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “We the People” party.

In a statement submitted to the committee before the hearing, Hirsch said the board tried, before voting to deny the party ballot access, to get clarity from “Justice For All” signature gatherers but were rebuffed.

Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of a nonpartisan voting rights group, gets it right when she said Republican legislators were hypocritical -- criticizing the elections board for checking the validity of signatures when the same GOP legislators were backing a variety of so-called “election integrity” initiatives.

"Investigating these petitions is an administrative function of the board, to ensure party petitions are valid," Kromm said. "To the extent that there were legitimate concerns regarding the petitions for the new political parties and their process, the N.C. State Board of Elections was fulfilling its duties and acting within its authority to investigate those concerns."

It takes some gumption to declare, as state Rep. Allen Chesser, R-Nash did, that “this entire process is somewhat jaded, and unduly influenced.”

Let’s look at some facts in this matter:

-- A Republican consulting firm was hired to gather signatures for West’s “Justice for All” party.
-- A lawsuit challenging the Election Board’s decision is being led by attorney Phil Strach. Strach has regularly represented state Republican legislative leaders, Republican candidates and the state GOP in partisan issues before the state Board of Elections and in state and federal courts. He is listed as a member of the state Republican Party’s Election Integrity Committee and is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association.
-- Most recently Strach questioned the right to fair elections. He said if fair elections were a right, then courts would be “inundated” with lawsuits when a candidate believes he is entitled to a “do-over” if they lost. Makes one wonder what Strach thinks of Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated and false claims about the 2020 election?
-- The committee’s invited expert was described as someone “uniquely qualified to discuss the State Board of Elections denial of political parties’ timely filed petitions to appear on the November ballot in North Carolina.” That invited authority was Andy Jackson, director of the Republican-leaning Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation.

This legislative hearing was little more than a taxpayer funded partisan political attack and effort to justify actions aimed at little more than giving favored candidates advantages.

Why would these legislative leaders, who have been pressing for more restrictions on voting under the guise of honest elections not be supportive – and heap praise upon – the agency responsible for assuring the upright conduct of our elections?

What it did achieve was clearly demonstrating the lack of sincerity of legislative leaders’ “election integrity” efforts and putting on clear display the reality they are seeking partisan advantage.

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