Raleigh, N.C. – State lawmakers moved to intervene in partisan lawsuits filed by Democratic Party attorneys this week to defend North Carolina election laws against political challenges brought during the COVID-19 crisis.
The partisan lawsuits challenge absentee ballot rules that passed the state General Assembly 160-1 and were signed by Governor Cooper in 2019.
They further challenge rules related to North Carolina’s ‘no-excuse’ vote-by-mail program already in place, which allows any voter to cast an absentee ballot by mail.
The lawsuits also challenge uniform hours for North Carolina’s ‘one-stop early voting’ program, which nearly doubled total early voting hours from 2010 to 2018.
Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) released a joint statement on their intervention to defend state elections law:
“The legislative process is the proper forum for elections reforms like those passed in bipartisan bills in 2019 to improve North Carolina’s absentee ballot process,” the lawmakers said Thursday.“Partisan lawsuits brought by Washington, D.C. Democratic Party attorneys in a pandemic, by contrast, are clearly the wrong process for effective election reforms, and we will defend the rights of voters against these partisan challenges.”“In the coming weeks the General Assembly will develop additional legislation to properly equip our elections systems with the resources and policies they need to effectively administer elections, and we look forward to further bipartisan collaboration to maximize voter access to the polls.”
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