Democrats and protesters pushed back against a sweeping elections law bill that House Republicans released Monday and plan to pass to the Senate before the week is over.
The 37-page bill proposes a litany of changes to the state's elections rules, including allowing any resident of a county to challenge any other resident's right to vote, gives State Auditor Dave Boliek the power to audit the general election in any county and would ban people who have never lived in North Carolina - but are residents of the state because their parents last lived here - from voting in state-level elections.
Protesters and Democrats argued throughout Tuesday that the bill was rushed, not giving them enough time to dig into all of the changes it proposed.
"We want voting to work efficiently and with integrity, and that means that everybody entitled to vote should be able to vote," Rep. Hugh Blackwell, R-Burke, said in the House Elections Law committee on Tuesday.
Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake, raised concerns that the sweeping changes proposed in House Bill 958 represent too much material to cover on the schedule laid out by Blackwell and other sponsors.
"This bill changes so much that limiting it to a 50-minute discussion is almost snubbing the people's voice. We need more time to ask questions and discuss this," Ball said.
Blackwell responded that most of the provisions were included in legislation introduced in the long session.
Ultimately, there was no public comment allowed at the House Elections Law committee meeting despite a packed conference room.
Voting rights groups said Tuesday afternoon that the legislation is the latest salvo in an effort to decrease trust in the voting system.
"It moves North Carolina away from a voter-centered election system and toward one that treats voters with suspicion rather than trust," Jennifer Rubin, the North Carolina president of the League of Women Voters, said at a press conference held by House Democrats.
During that press conference, Kat Roblez said the bill was intended to look innocuous and dull. Roblez is the senior voting rights counsel at Forward Justice.
"They don't want you to understand that it creates entirely new audit and challenge procedures that increase the ability of third parties to raise challenges. They don't want you to understand that it's going to allow the state auditor, who is a partisan elected official, to select which counties are going to be audited after the election, and they don't want you to understand that this is effectively going to end the attorney general's role as counsel to the State Board of Elections," Roblez said.
In front of the House Elections Law committee, Blackwell said the auditor provision is not intended to sway the result of elections.
Instead, Blackwell said, "It's really more of an evaluation or an assessment of how well the process works and where we can make improvements."
Blackwell also defended the clause giving any voter the power to request a review of any other voter.
"Nobody should object to a process that simply results in the removal of a vote that should not have been cast, and if that changes an outcome, that's probably appropriate," Blackwell said.
Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake, argued that the clause creates incentives for political actors to challenge whatever number of voters they need to in order to emerge victorious.
"People really want to win elections, and they are willing to be as strategic as they can to do it. And so the challenges aren't going to be earnest," Rubin said, adding that both parties are going to challenge voters in an effort to get votes rather than an effort to find ballots that shouldn't count.
The legislation also increases limits for when the identity of a donor must be disclosed from $100 to $1,000 and raises the threshold for 48-hour reports filed to disclose donations after the last campaign finance filing period of an election has closed from $1,000 to $2,000.
Rep. Alan Buansi, D-Wake, homed in on that provision during the Tuesday press conference, saying that the legislation would create less transparent elections.
"This kind of change without an explanation creates more of the perception that secrecy and deception pervades in our politics," Buansi said.
The elections law was set to appear in House Rules on Tuesday but was pulled from the calendar. Blackwell had said he hopes to pass it out of the House this week.
