A recent wave of staffing changes at the State Board of Elections began with a bill originally intended to make the Moravian star North Carolina’s state star. But as is often the case at the legislature, the final product ended up entirely different.
After the state House gave its stamp of approval, the state Senate stripped House Bill 125’s original Moravian star language and replaced it with various budgetary allocations and adjustments.
The State Board of Elections, newly helmed by Executive Director Sam Hayes, won big. The agency received $15 million to finish modernization of the state’s outdated election system, $1.5 million for litigation costs and $1.1 million to pay for seven new election board positions.
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This wasn’t your typical reorganization, though. For the first time, the State Board of Elections would have positions exempt from the North Carolina Human Resources Act, which requires most hiring and firing decisions to be made without regard to political affiliation or influence.
In Hayes’ view, the exempt positions were necessary to cut through red tape and ensure the people he wanted on his team could get to work quickly.
To state Democrats, it appeared to confirm their worst fears — that the administration of North Carolina’s elections would become the latest partisan battlefield.
Out with the old, in with the new
In May, Republican auditor Dave Boliek appointed a new State Board of Elections. Previously, the governor held that power. But one of last year’s Hurricane Helene packages included a provision shifting that power to the auditor. As a result, the state and county’s election boards flipped from 3-2 Democratic majorities to Republican-control.
Former State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell, a Democrat, was out. Hayes was in.
Hayes most recently served as attorney for Republican House Speakers Tim Moore and Destin Hall, which included work defending North Carolina’s voter ID law, redistricting maps and the law shifting elections appointment power to the auditor.
Hayes comes from a different, more partisan world, and doesn’t have experience in running elections, a source familiar with the internal workings of the state board told Carolina Public Press. The source has asked not to be named.
“A lot of us were holding out hope that they could find somebody who is a Republican, but has some background in elections, because when you work in it, you understand and appreciate the nonpartisan nature of the job of the staff,” the source said.
Six months after taking over, the agency has seen quite a bit of turnover. Hayes has filled out six of seven exempt positions.
He hired his chief of staff, Brian LiVecchi, from his time at the General Assembly.
Leah Byers is the agency’s new legislative affairs manager. She previously worked in the office of one of the most powerful state Republicans, Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell.
Jason Tyson will take on a new position, director of external affairs. He’s worked in communications at the Department of Insurance, Department of Labor, the UNC System office and the governor’s office, under former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.
Tim Hoegemeyer replaced Paul Cox as general counsel. Hoegemeyer previously ran for state auditor, but lost in the 2020 Republican primary. He’s also been an attorney at the State Board of Education, the Department of Public Instruction and the auditor’s office.
Lindsey Wakely and Parker Holland were promoted within the agency to serve as director of campaign finance and deputy director of election administration, respectively.
Taken together, the new hires have a partisan reputation that thus far, has proven difficult to escape.
In addition, the auditor hired Dallas Woodhouse as his liaison to the county boards of elections. Woodhouse served as the North Carolina Republican Party’s executive director from 2015 to 2019.
He is not a State Board of Elections employee, but in his new role, Woodhouse is responsible for guiding county election boards, specifically in regards to early voting plans.
Hayes doesn’t see the new elections hires as political hires. Rather, the exempt positions just give him more flexibility in filling out senior leadership without going through the normal hoops of the State Human Resources Act, he said.
He wants to build a team that has a stronger relationship with the legislature, and one that is focused on following the law.
But, it’s impossible to take politics out of everything, Hayes said.
“There is always going to be a political dent in these things,” he said. “I think where you separate yourself from that, and where you promote confidence in elections, is by following the law. We’re going to probably upset the right as much as we upset the left, if we just play it down the middle and follow the law as written.”
Institutional knowledge and trust
While new folks come in, some election board staffers have left voluntarily. Cox said the combination of a good outside job opportunity and leadership changes led to his departure. Deputy Director Trina Parker Velez retired after 30 years in elections. Neil Baddour also retired after 15 years at the State Board. Communications Director Patrick Gannon is currently on voluntary leave.
Hayes said about eight people have left in the past six months.
“I’ve just laid out my vision, and I think most of the staff are excited about it there, and there may be some who are less so, and maybe they have moved on for those reasons,” he said. “But I have not asked anyone to leave.”
Brinson Bell never asked for exempt positions, and neither did her predecessors, to her knowledge.
“I don’t understand, truly, the need for the political appointments,” she said. “I came into a staff that had been long serving at the State Board. Many of the staff members had been there 15, 20 years, and that gave us institutional knowledge of how to carry out the work.”
Now, she worries the agency will lose that, particularly as it faces a period of high-profile, demanding elections.
Associate General Counsel Adam Steele, Wakely and other longtime agency employees have stepped up in light of these departures, Hayes said.
He would challenge any of his skeptics to look at his record. In his first six months, Hayes has secured funding to finish election software modernization projects, launched the Registration Repair Project to obtain missing driver’s license and social security numbers and settled a related Department of Justice lawsuit.
The auditor and the Board of Elections
Not everyone is convinced, particularly about the extent of the auditor’s involvement in elections. By law, the auditor’s power stops with the appointment of election board members and budgetary assistance. But some think he has delved a bit deeper into election policy than he should.
After a research trip to Florida with Hayes and LiVecchi, Boliek made suggestions to the legislature about post-election audits.
“It’s just a level of involvement by an outside political actor that we’ve never seen before,” the person familiar with the internal workings of the State Board said. “The auditor is not an administrator of programs, and he’s now sort of delving into that. I think it’s confusing to people who work in elections.”
Hayes said the auditor has just as much right as anyone to advocate for legislation.
Brinson Bell led the elections board shortly after a ballot harvesting scandal led to widespread distrust in election administration. It took her staff a long time to rebuild trust, and convince North Carolinians that elections are run in a bipartisan, accurate fashion, she said.
“If you start interjecting the rhetoric, if you start having politically-appointed positions, then you’ve taken that message away and you’re confusing voters,” Brinson Bell said. “Potentially, you’re maybe even substantiating some of their fears and conspiracies, and that’s what we’ve got to avoid.”
However, a person familiar with the election director and auditor’s thinking said the agency’s reorganization is less of a Republican partisan shift and more of a balancing act from what they perceived as a partisan, Democratic agency under Brinson Bell.
“Some of the reports seemed to act as if everybody at the State Board of Elections prior to Republicans taking over eight months ago were nonpartisan, and it’s (nonsense),” said the source, who asked to remain unnamed.
One of the sticking points from the previous administration were numbered memos, guidance the state elections board issues to county boards of elections on how to implement election law.
In some Republicans’ view, Brinson Bell’s staff took too much liberty in interpreting the law. For Brinson Bell, the proof is in the pudding. She said her compass was always the voters, not politics.
“Look at the boards that I worked with, look at the work we achieved, the national awards that we received,” she said. “There is no evidence of partisanship in the work that we did.”
A firm statement
On the final day of early voting before this year’s municipal elections, the state board’s voter search tool went down in most counties.
The Democratic Party released a statement alleging that poll workers were having a hard time “quickly identifying and registering voters.”
“It’s clear that Republicans were wrong when they said that making Boliek the only State Auditor in the country that controls elections would not impact voting or the quality of our systems,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton wrote.
Later that evening, the state board released a statement of its own.
“Contrary to the statements from the North Carolina Democratic Party, there was no disruption to operations at polling places on Saturday,” it began. “Anderson Clayton, Chair of the NC Democratic Party, is either ignorant or intentionally spreading misinformation. Since his first day as executive director, Executive Director Sam Hayes has been working diligently to update election software that was neglected by the previous director and the then-Democratic majority.”
Brinson Bell was taken aback by the statement, which she saw as a stark contrast from the agency’s usual, nonpartisan tone.
“It’s not uncommon for political party leaders on both sides of the aisles to be making comments about the conduct of election administration,” she said. “It happened in my tenure, and as the chief election official, representing all voters, doing the work on behalf of all voters, you have to rise above the fray.”
Hayes said elections staff decided a firm statement was required. While he won’t respond to all the “partisan sniping,” he did want to correct “blatant misinformation.”
“Trying to equate some simple human error that took down the Voter Search Tool for a matter of hours on a Saturday — it was back up by that evening — with folks not being able to register and vote? That that was just just too far,” he said.
Clayton wasn’t surprised, she told CPP. To her, it was proof that the agency is partisan.
“The state legislature had promised the people of North Carolina when they made that decision and stripped the governor of the power to appoint that agency that they were not going to do this because of partisan issues,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we might have just seen the first slip in that.’”
Correction: Dallas Woodhouse was not previously a member of the Lee County Board of Elections. An earlier version of the article described his background incorrectly.
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