NC elections board chairman accuses Stein of misrepresenting board’s role in early voting plans

A top state elections official is accusing Gov. Josh Stein of making misstatements on social media about the board’s role in determining early voting sites.

In a post on X on Thursday, Stein said that under State Auditor David Boliek, “the State Board of Elections has been directing counties to eliminate Sunday voting and remove early voting from college campuses including the country's largest HBCU.” 

The auditor’s office oversees the elections board. Stein’s post was in response to an NBC News article that reported the reassignment of a North Carolina Republican operative who was hired by Boliek to help shape the state’s election boards and early voting plans.

Francis X. DeLuca, the chairman of the elections board, told Stein in a letter Friday that the board hasn’t been directing counties to eliminate Sunday voting. 

Under North Carolina law, county boards of elections handle developing and adopting their own early voting plans, DeLuca wrote. The board’s role is to provide technical guidance, ensure compliance with state and federal law and “support counties as they carry out their statutory responsibilities.” 

“We do not ‘direct’ county boards of elections to make particular policy choices,” DeLuca said in the letter, “and the professionals at the State Board have not, and will not, ‘direct’ county boards in the choices they make regarding their early voting plans, or  any other policy matters.” 

A spokesperson for Stein said in a statement Saturday morning to WRAL, “Yes, public confidence in elections forms the bedrock of our democracy. That is precisely why Governor Stein is so concerned about the State Board of Elections’ actions to politicize election administration and suppress voter access under the watch of the Auditor’s Office. The person who calls 9-1-1 is not the problem.” 

To suggest that the state board had a hand in influencing early voting plans, DeLuca said, “is unfair to the dedicated public servants across North Carolina who work long hours, often under intense public scrutiny, to ensure every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted accurately.” 

Republican state lawmakers stripped responsibility for overseeing state and county election boards away from Stein, a Democrat, in 2024 and gave the power to Boliek, a Republican. Boliek hired Dallas Woodhouse, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, to help shape county election boards and early voting plans.

Under Boliek, the state board of elections and all 100 county election boards have switched to GOP majorities, and some counties have begun enacting longtime Republican priorities such as eliminating early voting options on Sundays — a popular day with Black voters and on college campuses. Black voters and students tend to vote Democratic. 

Boliek recently reassigned Woodhouse, NBC News reported Wednesday morning. Woodhouse had served in the role since September. According to reporting from WLOS and NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.

“Every lawful voter deserves to have his or her voice heard,” Stein said in the X post. “Yet under Auditor Boliek’s watch, the State Board of Elections has been directing counties to eliminate Sunday voting and remove early voting from college campuses including the country's largest HBCU. It’s cynical politics and it’s wrong. To ‘reassign’ the former executive director of the NC Republican Party is too little too late. The administration of our elections should have been free from partisan influence from the beginning and should remain so.”

A spokesperson for Boliek didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Earlier this week, Woodhouse had referred a request for comment to the auditor’s office. 

DeLuca said in his letter that he respected Stein’s right to criticize the actions of elected 

officials, but that he couldn’t “permit the role of this agency and the work of North Carolina's election professionals to be mischaracterized by blatant factual misstatements.”

Nearly one-third of North Carolinians — 31.4% — say the state’s elections are becoming less trustworthy, according to an April poll conducted for Opinion Diagnostics, a polling company run by advisors to Republican politicians in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Only 15% of the 830 respondents said trust was rising, and 44% said their opinion remained unchanged. Another 9% were unsure. About 64% of North Carolinians are at least somewhat concerned that election officials won’t follow procedures for counting ballots, the poll found, and 38% said they’re “very concerned.”

“Statements that incorrectly portray the role of this agency or call into question the integrity of career election professionals without factual basis serve only to weaken and undermine that crucial confidence,” DeLuca said in his letter. “North Carolinians deserve an honest discussion about  election administration grounded in the facts of how our system actually works, and that is not accomplished by posts on social media made without regard for those facts.”