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Last week, North Carolina Democrats won when Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, who lost a tough race for the state’s Supreme Court, finally admitted defeat after a six-month legal battle to abandon the vote he claimed was non-giatial.
But that same morning, the party suffered a more consequential set. Losing control of the state commission that sets voting rules and awards election disputes.
The board oversees almost every aspect of a state election, big or small, and sets rules that determine what will enable or disable voting for monitoring campaign finance laws that are enabled or disabled. In the Supreme Court competition, he worked consistently to block Griffin’s agenda.
The conservative takeover comes after a Republican-controlled state legislature stripped North Carolina’s Democratic governor of authority to appoint board members and stripped of the law it granted Republican state auditors.
A board spokesman said the chairman is traveling and cannot answer questions about how the new Republican majority will restructure North Carolina elections, but experts said challenges like Griffin are likely to be successful and make it easier to reduce vast access to early voting.
“We’ll focus the arena on the benefits of the GOP,” said Gene Nicole, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies state democracy.
The parties who control the board have great powers about who vote, how those votes are counted and ultimately win the race.
Anne Webb, the common policy director for North Carolina, a liberal voting advocacy organization, called the shift “very consequential,” saying he was worried that registrations would remove voters who lack information from state roles and try to strengthen the requirements for those seeking to register or register provisional vote counts.
Conservatives called Democrats exaggerating concerns, especially after years of democratic rule. Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank in North Carolina, has acknowledged that a new majority on the board could change early voting locations or voter ID rules. However, he pointed out that many board decisions were made unanimously and not divided in line with party lines.
“In the Trump era, it means that even though people voted, there’s an epic plan to throw away the election results and get the GOP to win,” Kokai said. “I don’t think I’m seeing a stage set up for something like that.”
Historically, five members of the board have been appointed by the governor of North Carolina, three of whom came from the governor’s party. Since 2016, the governor has been a Democrat.
When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican majority in the state legislature passed the law, overturning the veto power of its predecessors and shifting that power to state auditors. That was an unusual step. No other elections have been overseen by state auditors.
Stein sued to block the law, and initially a lower court was by his side. However, in April, the Republican majority state courts of appeals issued a three-section ruling overturning lower court rulings without listening to verbal arguments.
The next day, state auditors nominated two new Republicans to the Election Commission, causing conservatives to flip control. One is a former lawmaker who led an effort to redraw the state’s parliamentary districts courtesy of the Conservative Party. The other was the long-time conservative think tank leader, a history of advancing baseless voter fraud claims.
After swearing with new members last week, the board’s first move was to fire executive director Karen Brinson Bell. The board denied the request to address Bell staff during the meeting, but she later issued a statement that the spokesman had provided it to Propobrica in response to a request for comment.
“We did this work in a toxic political environment targeting election experts who were harassed and threatened under extremely difficult circumstances,” she said of board employees. “I hope that people who have lost their elections will return to an era where they will admit defeat rather than demolish the entire electoral system and erode voter trust.”
Experts say the fight over a Supreme Court seat will provide a window into how changes to the Election Commission will affect future races, particularly close races with contested outcomes. North Carolina is swinging and has seen several such cases in recent years. After the 2018 election, the board ordered a new election for the U.S. House of Representatives seats when it was found that Republican victory was contaminated by illegal absentee voting plans.
Before the 2024 election, right-wing activists discussed how to overturn election losses using a similar plan that Griffin had carried out, according to records of calls obtained by Propublica.
In the month when incumbent Democrat Alison Riggs lost 734 votes, Griffin asked the Election Commission to throw out tens of thousands of votes. The board then concluded that a majority Democrats rejected his assignment and that voters were following the rules in place at the time. Griffin then sued.
Jerry Cohen, a former Congressional lawyer who is now a Democrat for the Wake County Election Commission, said it was “real possibility” for the Republican-controlled state committee to vote that “approved some of Griffin’s agenda.” If that had happened, Riggs could have fought the board’s decision in court and won, but she would have filed a lawsuit against the board rather than the same side.
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The law that empowers state auditors to appoint members of the state election commission also grants similar powers over the North Carolina county election commission. This means that each will be ruled by the Republican majority by the end of next month.
The county commission will approve locations and times for early voting when the majority of North Carolinians vote. Experts predicted that this could lead several committees to reduce the number of polling stations in areas with more Democrats, such as university campuses, or fill the votes if they are more likely to use them, such as on Sundays when Black churches “souls in polls” to fill in votes where Democrats are likely to use them.
Kokai argues that such changes are not necessarily intended to curb votes.
“If you really care about the vote, you do that,” he said. “If you’re going to do something else a mile away from campus, you can do it to vote.”
However, the Liberal Party hopes that the improved board will work with Republican-controlled Congress to transform the election in other ways.
“Things are going to look very different,” Webb said in the 2026 midterm elections.
