Don’t Say Vote: NC GOPers Want to Bar Election Officials From Encouraging Turnout
North Carolina Republicans have introduced a sweeping elections bill that, among other steps, would bar election officials from encouraging or promoting voter turnout.
It’s the latest and starkest example of a trend among Republicans of opposing even nonpartisan outreach efforts that could boost voting rates.
The proposed ban “raises real questions about what democracy means in North Carolina, who really holds the power, who government is answering to,” Andrew Garber, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, told Democracy Docket.
Rep. Allison Dahle, the top Democrat on North Carolina’s House Elections committee, was blunter.
“I get the feeling that people don’t want democracy,” Dahle told Democracy Docket.
Dahle said she fears that if it isn’t stopped, the idea of a ban on promoting turnout could spread to other states.
“I think North Carolina has become a testing ground,” Dahle said. “It’s become a place where [Republicans say], ‘let’s see if it works.’”
Indeed, the ban is just the latest extreme anti-democracy tactic pioneered by North Carolina Republicans over the last decade or so. In 2016, a court found that the state’s voter suppression law targeted Black voters with “surgical precision.” They drew multiple gerrymandered maps, and stripped the Democratic governor of several powers before he took office. This year, they waged a months-long campaign, ultimately unsuccessful, to overturn a Supreme Court race by having over 65,000 valid votes thrown out after the vote-counting, and two recounts, had been completed.
Dahle represents Wake County, home to Raleigh, where hundreds of local Democrats rallied Thursday as part of a national “Good Trouble” day of protest in honor of the fifth anniversary of Rep. John Lewis’ death.
Their march to the state capitol focused on one message: Stop the elections bill.
In addition to the turnout provision, the measure, known as HB 958, would add new voting restrictions for military and overseas voters, and ban ranked choice voting. It also would empower Sam Hayes, the state election board’s new director and a former top aide to the Republican House leader, to replace state election board staff with political appointees.
Speaking to reporters after Republicans held a hearing to unveil the bill last month, Hayes suggested that he was responsible for much of it.
“There are a number of things I’ve laid out that I would think that anybody, Democrat, Republican or independent or third party could get on board with,” Hayes said. “I have not made any drastic changes and what I’m looking to do is to make elections more efficient, more secure and most importantly, follow the law.”
After Republicans gained control of the board in May, they appointed a new GOP majority that quickly ousted Karen Brinson Bell, a respected nonpartisan election administrator, and replaced her with Hayes, a Republican operative.
On Thursday, Hayes unveiled a separate plan to require over 100,000 registered voters to provide additional information that’s missing from their records, or risk being disenfranchised.
If the GOP-controlled legislature passes HB 958, Gov. Josh Stein (D) is expected to veto it. But House Republicans are just one vote shy of the three-fifths supermajority required to override a veto.
In North Carolina, elections are run at both the state and local level by five-person boards, rather than by individual election officials. The ban would bar members of the state board and county boards from making “written or oral statements intended for general distribution or dissemination to the public at large encouraging or promoting voter turnout in any election.”
Republican lawmakers argue that boosting turnout shouldn’t be a priority for election administrators.
“The idea is that we want the state board to focus on the conduct of the election and that the responsibility for turnout is better handled by other folks,” Rep. Hugh Blackwell, the Elections committee chair and a sponsor of the bill, said when it was unveiled.
But he acknowledged: “We were trying to draw a line and we may not have gotten it just at the sweet spot,” and said changes could be made to the provision.
Blackwell did not respond to a request for comment.
“Voter turnout is a sign of a healthy democracy, and it should not be treated as a partisan matter,” Ann Webb, policy director of Common Cause North Carolina, said in a statement. “While the primary role of the boards of elections is to ensure orderly and accurate casting and counting of votes, encouraging turnout is a natural and nonpartisan aspect of that mission.”
A resolution of the National Association of Secretaries of State, reauthorized last year, states that all members “are committed to encouraging voter registration and increasing access to elections.”
Garber, with the Brennan Center, said the proposed ban likely infringes on constitutionally protected speech.
“This looks like what’s known as viewpoint discrimination,” Garber said. “The bill theoretically would allow them to discourage voter turnout – but they can’t encourage voter turnout. That’s basically always unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”
Garber compared the ban to a Texas law passed in 2021 that prohibited election officials from sending eligible voters an application for a mail ballot unless they requested it. After the Brennan Center sued, a court blocked the law as an infringement on free-speech rights. Though that injunction was later vacated on procedural grounds, the ruling that the provision violated the First Amendment was left unchallenged — suggesting that the North Carolina provision could be vulnerable to a similar challenge.
The ban also appears to conflict with the National Voter Registration Act. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” the 1993 law says. “It is the duty of the Federal, State and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”
Of course, a ban on encouraging turnout is hardly the only recent Republican initiative that suggests a hostility to voting.
Since 2020, several red states have passed laws similar to Texas’, blocking election officials from proactively sending out voter registration forms or applications for mail ballots.
North Carolina was one of many states that banned election officials from accepting private funds to run elections, after an organization created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $400 million to election offices during the pandemic. Much of that money funded outreach efforts aimed at encouraging voting.
After then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2021 instructing federal agencies to promote voter registration, Republicans reacted by filing lawsuits and launching a congressional probe. Among the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office in January was one rescinding Biden’s order.
Perhaps most revealingly, in 2023, a slew of GOP-controlled states left the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — which experts call the country’s most effective system for sharing voter roll information between states. Several cited ERIC’s requirement that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters to try to get them on the rolls.
“(ERIC) was a way to really identify who was not registered to vote,” Alabama Secretary of State Allen (R) said at the time. “And then, per the contract, the state would have to contact these voters and encourage them to get registered to vote.”
“Our job is not to turn people out,” Allen added. “That is the job of the candidates — to make people excited to go to the polls. Our job is to make sure Alabama elections are the safest in the country.”
Indeed, it’s common to find conservative thinkers and Republican politicians expressing qualms about the idea that everyone should vote — arguing that disengaged voters aren’t likely to make wise or well-informed decisions.
It’s a way of thinking that can have troubling implications.
“People who aren’t informed about issues or platforms — especially when it is so easy to become informed these days — have no business voting,” Josh Divine, who was nominated this year for a federal judgeship by Trump, wrote in his college newspaper in 2010. “[W]hich is why I propose state-administered literacy tests.”