As Trump visits, NCGOP prepares for 2022 by forming a committee on election integrity

Ahead of former President Donald Trump’s visit to their convention Saturday, North Carolina Republicans unveiled on Friday a 16-member committee tasked with addressing “election integrity” in next year’s elections.

The Election Integrity Committee will launch at the close of this weekend’s NCGOP convention in Greenville, where Trump is scheduled to make just his second public appearance since leaving office. The committee will engage with county election boards and the State Board of Elections, make “statutory and administrative rule recommendations,” and recruit poll observers and “election integrity volunteers,” according to the party.

NCGOP Chairman Michael Whatley said in a release election integrity is “an issue we must address head-on to move forward as a party and as a country.”

“In 2020, the North Carolina Republican Party led the nation in implementing an effective statewide strategy to protect the vote,” he said. “This Committee will spend the next year-and-a-half building on our past successes to ensure the 2022 elections in North Carolina remain fair and transparent.”

The committee will be chaired by Buck Newton, a former state senator from Wilson who ran unsuccessfully for attorney general in 2016. Other members include GOP officials, lawyers and political consultants from across the state. Neither Newton nor the NCGOP returned The News & Observer’s requests for comment in time for publication.

The formation of the committee comes as Republicans nationwide and in North Carolina have intensified their focus on alleged election irregularities and instances of fraudulent voting or illegally cast ballots. In February, the Republican National Committee launched its own Committee on Election Integrity to advocate for “election transparency.”

The GOP concern with voter fraud has been propelled by the former president, who has continued to claim the 2020 election was stolen or rigged months after his defeat.

Trump and other national Republicans have heralded North Carolina as one of few “successful states’‘ where the GOP was able to protect elections. Those states, which also include Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, were all contests Trump won in 2020.

During a panel at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Whatley said the absence of voter fraud in North Carolina last fall was due to the NCGOP’s disproportionate spending on legal resources — the party spent three-quarters of its annual operating budget on legal expenditures, he said — to scrutinize the electoral process.

That view of why the 2020 election in North Carolina was not tainted by voter fraud was endorsed by Trump in a statement Friday. “North Carolina produced a big victory for us, without a fraudulent outcome — missing ballots, illegal voting, dead people voting, and all of the other Democrat tricks,” he said.

Pushback from Democrats

In March, a group of Republican state senators introduced the Election Integrity Act, a bill that would prevent the collection of absentee ballots after 5 p.m. on Election Day, irrespective of when ballots are postmarked by.

During the 2020 election, the North Carolina State Board of Elections collected 14,500 mail-in ballots after Election Day. Under current North Carolina law, absentee ballots can be accepted up to three days after the election, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. In light of a surge in absentee voting and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the elections board allowed mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be accepted up to 12 days after the election. The change in policy was vigorously opposed by Republican lawmakers, who argued the legislature and not the elections board held the constitutional authority to change N.C. voting laws.

The party’s argument that its efforts to guarantee the integrity of elections were crucial to preventing fraudulent voting on the scale that Trump has for months claimed without evidence occurred in states he lost, has been disputed by Democrats, who have argued the Republican concern with extensive voter fraud is a pretense to advocate for more stringent measures like voter ID and limiting the scope of mail-in ballots.

“The North Carolina Republican Party continues to operate in voter fraud hysteria, propping up election integrity as an excuse to continue pushing bills that restrict voting,” Bobbie Richardson, the chair of the NC Democratic Party, said of the GOP committee in a statement.

“Republicans across the country are doing everything in their power to keep people from exercising their right to vote, and it is a threat to our democracy. North Carolina Democrats believe that our democracy is made stronger when people are able to make their voice heard,” she said.

In response to the GOP committee on election integrity, Richardson said the NCDP would strengthen its Voter Protection program, a multi-pronged initiative to “combat voter suppression, increase voter registration efforts, mobilize across the state, and establish educational initiatives.”

SCANT CASES OF VOTER FRAUD

There were relatively few cases of fraudulent voting or otherwise illegally cast ballots during last year’s election in North Carolina, according to data maintained by the State Board of Elections.

Between September 1, 2020 and April 27, 2021, the NCSBE received a total of 275 complaints across a variety of potential violations. The most common complaints were of double voting (the same person casting a ballot in the same election twice); felon voting, which is illegal in North Carolina for convicted felons until they complete probation or post-release supervision; and voter impersonation.

Of those complaints, the NCSBE referred 38 cases for prosecution to district attorneys, out of which 33 cases were of felon voting. A total of 5,524,804 votes were cast for president in North Carolina last year, according to the state’s official, certified results.

“The State Board of Elections has a dedicated Investigations Division with trained, experienced staff who are required by law to investigate credible allegations of violations of election law, fraud and irregularities and refer cases to prosecutors when warranted by evidence,” said Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the NCSBE.

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