State Auditor Dave Boliek has appointed (left to right) Stacy Clyde Eggers IV, Francis DeLuca, and former state Senator Bob Rucho to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. (File photos)
There is a good case to be made that North Carolina’s constitution provides for the election of too many statewide offices. This is especially true given that elections for the 10 “Council of State” offices take place during presidential election years when the ballot is long, and many voters know little-to-nothing about most candidates.
What purpose it serves for the state to hold partisan elections to fill mostly bureaucratic positions like those held by the commissioners of labor, insurance and agriculture – other than perhaps to provide platforms for politicians to run for other, more desirable offices, or to secure lifetime employment – is hard to articulate. Likewise, secretary of state – an office that just two individuals have occupied for 81 of the last 89 years – is another strong candidate to become an appointed office.
The argument in favor of partisan elections for five slots – governor, lt. governor, attorney general, treasurer, and superintendent of public instruction – is more obvious.
And that leaves one other office: the historically obscure position of auditor. The idea of providing the auditor – the state’s accountant – with a mandate from voters and some independent authority arguably makes some sense.
The national website Ballotpedia describes the position this way:
“The auditor is a state-level position in 48 states that supervises and has administrative rights over the accounting and financial functions of the state. Additionally, auditors act as watchdogs over other state agencies, performing internal government audits and investigating fraud allegations.”
Most states have an auditor. A little less than half fill the office with a partisan election. Several other states elect (and vest similar authority in) an office known as the controller.
All that said, if you’re like the vast majority of North Carolina voters, the choice you made last November in the auditor’s race was pretty low on your list of election priorities. Indeed, if Beth Wood — the Democratic CPA who was elected in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 — had not been forced to resign in 2023 in the aftermath of a post-holiday party car wreck, it seems likely that she would have prevailed in a fifth consecutive snooze of an election.
Wood’s resignation, however, provided Republicans with an opening and they seized upon it by nominating Dave Boliek, an ambitious lawyer and former Democrat with a familiar name (his father was a Triangle area TV news reporter for many years).
During the 2024 campaign, Boliek ran on a typical platform – promising to be a nonpartisan watchdog who would “leave the political party affiliation at the door.” But, as the saying goes, that was then, and this is now.
And as it turned out, for Republican lawmakers looking for ways to seize more powers from Gov. Josh Stein, Boliek’s victory in the contest turned out to be a convenient tool. Thanks to a bill rammed through during last fall’s post-election lame duck session, during which the GOP still maintained veto-proof supermajorities, Boliek was gifted with new powers that have absolutely nothing to do with the auditor’s traditional role – including bizarrely enough, appointing the state Board of Elections.
And last week, following an unsigned ruling from the overwhelmingly Republican state Court of Appeals blessing the transfer, the man who promised to be a nonpartisan watchdog did an about-face.
In addition to reappointing current Republican election board member Stacy “Four” Eggers, Boliek tabbed two of the most partisan right-wing ideologues imaginable from the state’s firmament of conservative politicos: Robert Rucho and Francis X. Deluca.
Rucho is a Matthews dentist and former state senator who, among other things, oversaw partisan gerrymandering as the chair of the Senate Elections Committee and helped shepherd the infamous 2013 “Monster Voting Law” through the Senate – a law whose voter ID provision, according to a federal court, sought to suppress the participation by Black voters with “surgical precision.”
Meanwhile, DeLuca is a one-time congressional candidate and former boss of the right-wing Pope-Civitas Institute – a group that long and passionately championed dozens of extreme (and sometimes downright strange) causes, including most relevantly, making it much harder for North Carolinians to vote.
All in all, it’s an amazing and absurd situation. A regulatory agency long and logically overseen by the state’s chief executive has been turned over to the state’s accountant for no reason other than blatant partisanship. No other state grants its auditor such power. One shudders to think of the staffing and policy changes that are in the offing. Senate GOP leader Phil Berger’s minions will no doubt be conveying a long list in short order.
Republican defenders claim that enacting such a shift is well within the legislature’s lawmaking authority, but ultimately, it makes no more sense, logically or legally, to place the auditor in charge of elections than it would to hand the duty to the agriculture commissioner – especially when voters had no inkling of the shift when they cast their ballots. Unfortunately, for Republican lawmakers bent on shamelessly seizing power at every turn, logic and the will of voters is rarely of much interest these days.
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