Cooper vetoes GOP bill shifting appointment power over election boards to legislature
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed on Thursday a GOP bill that would restructure election boards and change how their members are appointed.
Republican lawmakers sent Senate Bill 749 to Cooper’s desk last week after announcing the proposal months earlier. The bill would require state and local election boards to have an even bipartisan split, and shift the power to appoint their members from the governor to the legislature.
Since the GOP secured supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, Republican lawmakers have overridden more than a dozen vetoes by Cooper, suggesting that the bill could be taken up for override votes and enacted into law fairly quickly, when lawmakers return for votes next month.
The State Board of Elections currently has five members, and the current appointment process allows the governor to choose all five. That usually results in the governor’s party having a 3-2 majority. Under SB 749, the state board would be expanded to eight seats. The GOP and Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate would get to appoint two members each.
County election boards would be reduced to four seats, with each legislative leader of both parties getting to appoint one member.
Cooper, who had previously said he would veto the Republican bill, said in a statement Thursday that the bill “could doom our state’s elections to gridlock and severely limit early voting.”
He also said the bill could empower lawmakers or courts to “change the results of an election if they don’t like the winner.”
“That’s a serious threat to our democracy, particularly after the nation just saw a presidential candidate try to strongarm state officials into reversing his losing election result,” Cooper said. “Courts have already ruled the ideas in this bill unconstitutional, and voters overwhelmingly said no when the legislature tried to change the constitution.”
The bill’s requirement that state and county election boards have an even bipartisan split has raised concerns about the potential of ties on important decisions, but the bill doesn’t address what would happen in those situations.
Asked about how situations would be resolved during debate on the House floor last week, House Rules Chairman Destin Hall, a Republican, said: “When there’s a deadlock, nothing happens. Whatever the issue is before — just like before this body — if it’s a tie, there’s no affirmative action.”
GOP Sen. Warren Daniel, a chairman of the Senate Redistricting and Elections Committee, said in response to Cooper’s veto that the bill would make voters confident that state and local election boards were operating with their best interest in mind, and not that of any particular party.
“Single-party control has led to distrust and skepticism among voters,” Daniel said in a statement. “Voters should be asking themselves why Gov. Cooper is so desperate to maintain his partisan grip on the State Board of Elections.”
“I look forward to once again overriding Gov. Cooper’s veto and establishing truly bipartisan boards of elections in North Carolina.”
Democrats have pointed out that in 2018, North Carolinians rejected a ballot measure that would’ve amended the state constitution to allow the legislature to appoint members to the state election board. They’ve said the defeat of that measure showed what voters made of the idea.
But Republicans have argued that the governor shouldn’t be able to appoint all of the members, and that it’s better for lawmakers to be responsible for that.
This story was originally published September 28, 2023 at 3:36 PM.
