Old North News

Ken Cuccinelli, National Chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, has renewed his group's criticism of SB 747, an election integrity bill, and has urged the House GOP to use its veto-proof majority and take immediate action to strengthen the bill. While the group notes that the newest version of the bill is an improvement over the Senate's version, which was stripped of several provisions in committee, Cuccinelli listed multiple provisions in the current draft that his organization sees as deficiencies.

"Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate, and voters recently installed a new State Supreme Court free from the most radical elements who long-obstructed election integrity," Cuccinelli said in a statement issued as part of a press release. "But instead of passing a real election integrity bill that earns the trust and confidence of voters, they’re toiling with ‘happy-to-be-glad’ measures that fail to confront many of the biggest threats to secure, transparent, and accountable elections," he said.

"The reality is that in their current form, S.B. 747 and the House substitute continue to omit vitally important loophole closures that will result in a continuing failure of voter confidence to occur in North Carolina. Without delay, we urge the House to further address the deficiencies in the elections bill before it passes out of the House and to give election integrity the durability and permanence voters deserve, most critically, by amending the provisions of House Bill 770 (access to voted ballots) and House Bill 772 (poll observer access and protections) into its proposed substitute," Cuccinelli's statement said.

SB747 was introduced on June 1, the legislature's website says. After amendments in two Senate committees, the bill was sent to the House on June 22.

ETI expressed concerns with the Senate's final version, saying that while it contained several provisions that would help support free, transparent and accountable elections in North Carolina, ETI believed that the bill still lacked several "key ballot and voter integrity elements," Old North News reported.

One of ETI's key criticisms of SB747 is that it eliminates a state political party's authority to decide whether or not to hold open primaries or close its primaries to unaffiliated voters.

Other provisions that ETI sees as deficiencies in SB747 include allowing for "curing" of mail-in ballot envelopes after the polls close on election day, failing to specifically allow Cast Vote Records (CVRs) to be publicly releasable immediately after election day as occurs in 28 other states, and not requiring voters using same-day registration and voting to be issued a provisional ballot to allow time for address verification.

ETI said it also believes the bill lacks protections for poll observers and the maintenance of voter lists. Due to these alleged deficiencies, ETI has urged the passage of two companion bills that would address these concerns. HB 770 would reinstate poll observer protections that ETI argues were "decimated in 2022 by the State Board of Elections," the organization said. HB772 would require making Cast Vote Records (CVRs) public records. CVRs are a tool used for post-election audits and can help determine the accuracy of the vote count.

A recent poll conducted by the John Locke Foundation found that only 50.7% of likely North Carolina voters believed that this year's elections will be free and fair. This represented a 10-point decrease in voter confidence since last year's poll.

The prior report from Old North News said that as many as 14% of NC's voters, roughly a million people, have been identified as duplicates or ineligible voters. The report said that according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, North Carolina ranked eighth in the number of deceased voters, but leads the U.S. in deceased registered voters credited for voting after death.