State board to reconsider effort to remove Republican House candidate from ballot
RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – Republicans appealed a decision Friday to keep one of the party’s candidates on the ballot in a race for a state House seat, as party leaders question the man’s eligibility.
Joseph Gibson filed last month to run in the Republican primary against incumbent Rep. Reece Pyrtle to represent Rockingham County in the state House of Representatives.
Party leaders have pushed to remove Gibson from the ballot, citing a background check that revealed a series of felony convictions when Gibson lived in Connecticut, including for robbery, dating back to the 90s.
Rockingham County Republican Party Chair Diane Parnell challenged Gibon’s candidacy and whether he’s had his rights restored.
The matter has gone back and forth this month between the Rockingham County Board of Elections and the NC State Board of Elections and could be resolved early next week following Friday’s appeal.
Stephen Wiley, caucus director for House Republicans who works to recruit candidates to run for office, said he was unaware of Gibson’s background when he first ran against Pyrtle in 2022. That time, Pyrtle won the primary by a 4-1 margin.
Wiley ran a background check this time, which turned up the information about Gibson’s prior convictions.
“So, with how often the candidate filing period kept starting and stopping in 2022, I mean, he’s just got a talent for slipping through the cracks and I just didn’t have time to see it,” Wiley said. “It’s pretty impossible to verify information on a lot of these folks quickly enough.”
Earlier this month, when the Rockingham County Board of Elections first considered the matter, members voted unanimously to remove Gibson from the ballot.
This week, the state Board of Elections took up the issue and sent it back to the county level for the board to reconsider after Gibson said he hadn’t been properly notified about the hearing regarding his candidacy.
During the state hearing, Gibson said, “This challenge reeks of political assassination.”
He claimed Republicans were targeting him because of his opposition to a proposal to bring a casino to Rockingham County.
“The only thing that has changed in the last two years since I was last on the ballot is that I have made public and to my constituents that I oppose certain issues concerning Rockingham County political issues, for one the casinos,” said Gibson.
Wiley said the casino debate had nothing to do with the challenge to Gibson’s candidacy.
“This is really just nonsense that he’s thrown out there, that for whatever reason some folks want to give credence to,” Wiley said. “We can’t in good conscience criticize the other side if we don’t hold our own side accountable when there are such prominent issues as this.”
On Wednesday, the Rockingham board reconsidered the challenge.
An order from the board notes that members “expressed concerns about the credibility of Gibson’s testimony” but a majority determined he “has carried his burden of proof” that he’d received an unconditional discharge from his felony convictions from the state of Connecticut.
In the appeal filed with the state on Friday, Republicans noted Gibson did not provide any documents to corroborate what he said and that he’d made “inconsistent statements.”
If Gibson is ultimately removed from the ballot, Rep. Pyrtle would automatically win re-election because no other candidates filed.
Following his loss in 2022, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism published a report on Gibson based on his social media posts and podcasts, describing him as a “white supremacist and anti-government extremist” and that the “neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) promoted his candidacy on their Telegram channel as ‘one of our members in NC.’”
Gibson did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
Wiley said he was unaware of what the ADL had uncovered until earlier this month.
“We didn’t really know much about his policy positions, some of the more extreme policy positions that have since come out,” he said. “His integrity is clearly very low. He has repeatedly lied.”
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