After a pair of lengthy — and, at times, testy — hearings, the Buncombe County Board of Elections denied both formal candidate challenges brought for this year’s elections. Asheville Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley will be allowed to run for reelection to City Council, and Victor “Vic” Morman can compete in the Republican primary for Buncombe County Sheriff.
Before the five-member board and an at-capacity gallery of dozens of attendees, challenger John Miall raised questions about Mosley’s residency, property ownership, and voting history in Georgia. Citing recent news reports and public records, he noted that she had long claimed a tax break for a home in Atlanta legally available only to permanent residents of the state. He also showed that she had voted in both Georgia and North Carolina elections in 2012 and 2014.
Mosley testified under oath that she relocated to Asheville in 2016 and hadn’t been aware that the homestead exemption on her Atlanta property had continued after the move. After reporters brought the tax break to her attention, she said, she moved to have it retroactively removed from the property. And her attorney, Eugene Ellison, argued that questions about her voting record from over a decade ago didn’t impact her current eligibility as a candidate.
Addressing allegations that she didn’t meet the Asheville residency requirement for Council candidates, Mosley confirmed that she doesn’t currently live at the Kenilworth home listed on her voter registration, which was severely damaged during Hurricane Helene. However, she provided a lease document from July for an apartment on Florence Street, just south of downtown Asheville and inside city limits.
The vice mayor explained that she had been renting the apartment since 2017, using it as an occasional “respite” between recovering from breast cancer treatments and caring for her elderly father in Kenilworth. After being appointed to Council in September 2020, Mosley said, she began to feel unsafe at the family home, referencing a tombstone placed in her yard and a burglary after her father’s passing in early 2021. She proceeded to spend more time at the apartment for security reasons and moved there full-time after the storm, but said she eventually intends to repair and return to the Kenilworth property.
(Activist groups have said that the tombstones they placed with Mosley and other Council members, made of papier-mâché and covered in the names of Black people killed by police, were not threats but protest art. The Asheville Police Department has said there are no public records of reports filed at Mosley’s Kenilworth address since she joined Council.)
Miall focused his testimony on Mosley’s history before joining Council. He called Heather Boyd as a “neutral fact witness.” She is a Transylvania County resident who had compiled public records on the vice mayor to establish Mosley’s voting patterns and the Georgia tax history.
Ellison fiercely challenged the relevance of those facts and Boyd’s ability to establish them from public record alone. At one point during Ellison’s cross-examination, Miall accused him of berating the witness. Election board Chair Glenda Weinert then ordered both parties to stop, saying that the reliability of public records was foundational to legal argument.
“If I read something, and it came from the state of Georgia website or the North Carolina Board of Elections — God help us all if we can’t trust that document that comes from a public record,” Weinert remarked.
The board then voted unanimously to deny Miall’s residency challenge. But several members said that the hearing did surface questions about Mosley outside the scope of their authority.
“There’s a great deal here to be concerned with. But my issue is what we need to be concerned with,” said board member Mary Ann Braine. “I don’t think there’s an issue with where you have been living. I think your domicile is in Asheville. There’s a lot of other issues that might be dealt with in other places.”
The North Carolina State Board of Elections is continuing its own investigation into Mosley, according to spokesperson Jason Tyson, and has yet to refer the case to any external agency. Miall told BPR he did not intend to appeal his own challenge to the state board.
As she left the hearing, Mosley did not respond when asked how she expected the issues raised to impact her reelection campaign.
Morman proves party registration
The board’s hearing about Morman concerned whether the candidate for sheriff had met the legally required 90-day minimum for being registered with a party before filing to run.
Challenger Tina Lunsford, a Republican who previously told BPR she supports the other Republican sheriff candidate, Gary Parris, provided records from state elections officials showing that Morman changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican on Sept. 22. Because Morman filed for the sheriff’s race on Dec. 18, less than 90 days after he switched, she argued that he shouldn’t be allowed on the ballot.
However, Morman provided documentation from the N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles showing that he’d actually filed his party switch on Sept. 19, satisfying the 90-day requirement. Four election board members voted to affirm that this record was sufficient proof. Braine abstained, saying she still had concerns about the timeliness of updates to the state elections database.
See the full recording and documents from the Jan. 20 hearings.
