RALEIGH, N.C. — As national hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress continue this week, Democratic lawmakers at the N.C. General Assembly have introduced a bill that would crack down on future attempts to overturn election results here.
“Our system of checks and balances and free and fair electrons are the bedrock of our democracy,” Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Raleigh Democrat who sponsored the bill, told reporters Tuesday. “In the United States we follow the law, common sense and facts when it comes to our elections. That means accepting the results and respecting the election process.”
The bill would create new criminal penalties for a range of actions like intimidating voters, interfering with elections officials, or conducting “mass, indiscriminate, and groundless challenging of voters” and their eligibility to vote.
It would also create more requirements for political party volunteers to be officially certified as “poll observers” and would add new rules and funding for the personal security of elections officials. The same day the bill was announced in Raleigh, elections officials from Georgia were in Washington, D.C., testifying about the threats they received after state leaders refused then-President Donald Trump’s request for Georgia to “find” more votes for him so that he would win the state.
North Carolina’s top Republican lawmakers didn’t immediately respond to the Democrats’ wide-ranging proposal Tuesday, and it’s unlikely to become law, but Chaudhuri said it was important regardless.
“With the big lie left unchecked and unchallenged, we’ve now witnessed the January 6 insurrection,” he said. “And we’ve witnessed voter intimidation, poll worker intimidation, and election official intimidation at the state and local level.”
The bill has numerous pieces, tackling different parts of election administration and related concerns.
Notably, the bill would make it a crime for North Carolina elections officials to refuse to certify an election unless they have “substantial evidence” of something amiss. Such strategies are already playing out in other states. Earlier this month, in New Mexico, a Republican-led elections board refused to certify their county’s recent election results.
Their decision was not due to any specific allegations or evidence, the local Alamogordo Daily News reported, but instead was because the officials wanted to protest New Mexico’s use of voting machines made by Dominion, a company that Trump and his supporters have targeted with conspiracy theories.
While elections officials in North Carolina already conduct audits after elections here, the bill would clarify the rules for those audits.
It would also ban the kind of outside, third-party “forensic audits” like the one that recently ended in debacle in Arizona and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
Last year, a group of Republicans at the legislature called the Freedom Caucus ordered Durham County to let them audit its voting machines for signs of secret fraud. Durham, which has a large Black population, is among the most Democratic-leaning places in the state.
State elections officials fought the GOP request, saying politicians absolutely could not tamper with elections machines and that if the lawmakers did succeed in seizing voting machines from Durham or anywhere else, they’d need to be replaced to ensure future election security.
Freedom Caucus leaders said they picked at random and didn’t target Durham, but Durham Democratic Sen. Natalie Murdock, who co-sponsored Tuesday’s bill with Chaudhuri, is not convinced.
“This random selection of counties just so happened to target one of the most diverse counties in the state,” Murdock said, adding: “We see right through the partisan tactics to push the Big Lie. This is part of a national and coordinated strategy to use voter intimidation, not only of voters but of election officials, when conservatives don’t get their way in an election.”
Beaufort County Republican Rep. Keith Kidwell, the chair of the Freedom Caucus, did not respond to questions about the bill in general, or Murdock’s suggestion about his group targeting Durham due to its large minority population.
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