Summary:
- North Carolina Republicans used SB382 to seize control of state and county Boards of Elections and are now promoting new rules that will make voting more difficult for eligible and duly-registered North Carolina citizens
- Republican leadership removed voting sites from several college campuses and reduced Sunday and early voting hours in multiple counties.
- The state board is also considering rules to target and preemptively remove “potential noncitizens” from the list of registered voters using mysterious and unspecified “federal databases.”
American elections should be free, fair, and secure. Unfortunately, North Carolina Republicans have a history of making it harder for eligible and duly-registered voters to cast ballots–and they’re not stopping now.
Republicans often claim that their tactics will make elections more secure. But American elections are already incredibly secure–so secure that even the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank responsible for Project 2025, shows only 58 instances of voter fraud in North Carolina over 38 years. That’s a 0.000071% rate, or a 1 in 140,000 chance of fraud. It’s 9 times more likely that you’ll be struck by lightning some day than it is that 1 fraudulent vote will be cast in a North Carolina election.
Despite the security of our elections, Republicans have introduced rules designed to create barriers. Their hope seems to be that voters will trip over these hurdles–or look at the obstacle course they’ve created and decide to stay home.
New Proposals Create Hurdles for NC Citizens, Risk of Partisan Election Meddling
Republicans’ latest effort to make voter registration, and voting itself, more cumbersome for North Carolina citizens include suggestions that voters should not be allowed to use utility bills as proof of residence and a new suite of rules that would remove registered voters from the voter rolls if federal databases identify them as “potential noncitizens.” The risk that the government could arbitrarily weaponize this database against voters on the basis of race, ethnicity, or political party to influence election outcomes is grave and obvious. In addition to imposing new, onerous burdens on voters whose registration may be spuriously challenged, the Board is creating a new risk for voters: that they may be challenged and not receive the single physical notice the proposed regulations would require the local board to mail to their last known residential address. It is much more likely that some notices will not reach intended recipients (for example, anyone who moves residences and is mailed a notice during the moving period) than that anyone will commit voter fraud–a sign that the Board is enthusiastically willing to accidentally or deliberately disenfranchise eligible, duly-registered voters in order to perform an act of political theater.
The public comment period for these changes will run from January 15, 2026, through March 16, 2026 and can be made through any of the following methods:
- Online: Public Comment Portal: 2026 List Maintenance Rules Review
- Email: rulemaking.sboe@ncsbe.gov (Note: Commenter should identify the specific rule being commented on.)
- Mail: Attn: Rulemaking Coordinator, P.O. Box 27255, Raleigh, NC 27611-7255 (Note: Commenter should identify the specific rule being commented on.)
Republican Boards have also recently removed voting sites at North Carolina A&T University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Elon University, and Western Carolina University despite significant pushback from students. Additionally, they cut voting hours and Sunday voting from Alamance, Brunswick, Columbus, Craven, Cumberland, Greene, Harnett, Madison, Pitt, and Wayne counties. The whole meeting can be viewed here.
Campus polling sites routinely serve a significant number of early voters. During the 2024 general election, for example, the early voting location at Western Carolina University had the 2nd highest turnout of any site in Jackson County, with over 2,900 voters at the site, making up nearly 17% of the entire county electorate. During the 2024 primary, despite lower turnout at WCU, the campus early voting location still made up 14% of total Jackson County primary voters. In Guilford County, both the NC A&T and UNCG voting sites also saw significant voter turnout in the 2024 General Election, with 6,480 and 6,799 voters respectively.
Republicans’ Longstanding Commitment to Making Voting Burdensome
These are only the latest in Republicans’ many efforts to deter voters and undermine fair elections. In 2023, they created a new photo ID rule, an additional paperwork process for mail-in ballots, and shortened the mail-in voting window to count only ballots that arrive by election night. That rule functionally gives mail-in voters fewer days to vote than in-person voters at a time when the Trump administration’s federal cuts to the US Postal Service will reduce delivery times across the country, with outsized impacts on rural residents.
In 2024, the NCGOP and Jefferson Griffin, a sitting NC Court of Appeals Judge who unsuccessfully challenged Justice Allison Riggs for a seat on the NC Supreme Court, tried multiple different tactics to throw out tens of thousands of ballots cast by eligible, duly-registered voters. These tactics included challenging the validity of ballots cast by members of our armed forces currently serving overseas and throwing out ballots cast by people who had voted here for years–including his opponents’ own parents.
Also in 2024, the Republican legislature passed SB382, a bill that took State Board of Elections appointments away from Governor Josh Stein (D) and gave them to Auditor Dave Boliek (R). This partisan power grab enabled Republicans to seize control of all 100 County Boards of Election and the State Board of Elections.
In September 2025, Auditor Boliek appointed former Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse to oversee all 100 county boards of elections, breaking with precedent to appoint a partisan political professional rather than a neutral career bureaucrat. In his previous role, Woodhouse stated that he wanted to remove Sunday voting and voting on college campuses. The State Board of Elections has now done exactly that for the upcoming 2026 primary elections.
These decisions make it harder for specific groups of eligible, registered voters to access their historic voting sites and undermine explicitly non-partisan community traditions like campus walks to the polls or churches’ Souls to the Polls. Some of these changes are currently being litigated, and may still face court-ordered changes.
Save these dates for the 2026 primary election:
Feb. 6, 2026: Voter registration deadline
Feb. 12, 2026: In-person early voting begins.
Feb. 17, 2026: Absentee ballot request deadline
Feb. 28, 2026: In-person early voting ends
March 3, 2026: Primary Election Day
March 3, 2026: Absentee ballot return deadline
