The North Carolina State Board of Elections made appointments to all 100 county boards of elections at the beginning of July. State auditor Dave Boliek also appointed new chairpersons as part of his new powers updated by the Republican-majority legislature in 2024.
NC politics expert Chris Cooper, Madison Distinguished Professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University, chatted with BPR’s Jose Sandoval about these new appointments and what it means for the region.
Cooper’s Q&A with BPR reporter and host Jose Sandoval is below, edited for clarity and brevity.
Sandoval: Can you talk about how the appointments work and also, who votes for the members?
Copper: All 100 counties have five member boards and it's been that way for a good while now; it's a little over a hundred years. The party of the governor got the appointment power for the chair. So you would get two Democrats, two Republicans, and then the chair. The tiebreaker would be aligned with the party of the governor.
Of course, right now Josh Stein is our governor. That would be a Democrat but then last fall we had a change to that. There was a bill that actually began about dentists and how they get to practice medicine, but then it turned into a Helene relief bill. Then it transformed into a bill that shifted the levers of power in our state.
One of the ways in which that happened was they took that chair appointment power from the governor and they gave it to the party of the auditor. We’re the only state in the country that does it that way. So what happened in July was all 100 counties had to either reappoint members or appoint new ones, and all 100 county boards flipped from democratic control to Republican control.
Sandoval: Can you also talk about how these new boards of election can possibly impact policy?
Cooper: County boards of elections are really critical. So if you ever wondered like, “why is there an early voting location in this one neighborhood and not in another neighborhood?” The answer is the county board of elections are the ones that make that determination.
Or “why do some counties have more early voting sites than others?” Again, that's the county boards of elections that make those determinations. A lot of the keys about how voter rolls are maintained are also done at the county level, so there's an incredible amount of power ideally administered in a really non-partisan way, and I think for the most part, our county boards of elections do that.
Sandoval: So municipal election candidates filing is this month. Can you explain the upcoming municipal election and the impact that it could have on local politics?
Cooper: In 2025 some, but not all of our municipalities have elections in what we call off years or odd years. Unfortunately, a little bit of the work is on the voter to figure out if you live within a municipality. It's not enough just to have the name of a town and your street address. You actually have to live in that town and pay taxes. It's incredibly confusing.
Luckily, those county board of elections that we talked about are great in helping people figure that out. So if you can't navigate the State Board of Elections website, call your county board of elections.
A lot of these are nonpartisan elections. In other words, people don't run under partisan labels. Some are under partisan labels, and so they're gonna determine a whole lot of things about your quality of life, what your local taxes are, if you live in a municipality or things that may seem as silly, but also it could be important like do you have a social district.
Sandoval: Are there any local races that you are particularly interested in?
Cooper: We have municipal elections in literally every county in the western part of the state, I believe that are up in 2025. I live in the town of Sylva. That's one that I find particularly interesting. We've had some battles between the local municipality in Sylva and the County Commission in Jackson County. So a few of those board seats are open, including a mayor's seat, and those are technically non-partisan elections.
That's gonna be a really interesting one to watch just because it's been so divided and the town has sometimes been in contrast with the county, but you can really rinse and repeat that same story across Western North Carolina, and this is a real growing fault line in North Carolina politics.
Candidate filing period begins on July 7 and ends at noon on July 18. The general election starts on Tuesday, Nov. 4. To see if your county has a municipal election, check the State Board of Elections website.
