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Early last week North Carolina State Board of Elections issued a statement announcing an automatic adjustment to campaign contribution limits, increasing the maximum contribution from $5,600 to $6,400. The state board of elections is required by statute to modify the campaign contribution limit for state and local campaigns following every election. The original limit was...

How did voter registration in North Carolina change in 2022? What can we expect for voter registration in the state in 2023 and beyond? Let’s find out using the John Locke Foundation’s Voter Registration Changes page. Party Registration Changes in 2022 Here are the party registration changes for 2022: Democrats increased by 10,044 to 2,505,604.Republicans...

Last spring, former North Carolina Congressman and Trump administration official Mark Meadows faced allegations that he committed voter registration fraud: The allegation is that he registered to vote at a place he never maintained as a residence and then voted absentee by mail with that registration, committing both voter registration and election fraud. (Shortly after,...

General Assembly leaders plan to redraw state legislative districts, but their plan might not comply with the North Carolina ConstitutionThe North Carolina Supreme Court has reopened the redistricting process with a recent ruling in Harper v. HallThe renewed redistricting process would likely result in the overturning of Harper v. Hall by a new Supreme Court...

The late United State Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was justifiably famous for his sharp dissents. Justice Phil Berger Jr. seems to have channeled his inner Scalia in his dissent in Holmes v. Moore, a case in which the lame-duck North Carolina Supreme Court voted 4-3 on party lines to overturn the state’s voter ID...

Gov. Roy Cooper has announced that he will appoint progressive attorney Allison Riggs to the North Carolina Court of Appeal. Riggs will complete the term of Richard Dietz, who won election to the North Carolina Supreme Court last November as part of a Republican sweep of statewide judicial elections. Riggs has made a career of...

Gov. Roy Cooper has announced that he will appoint progressive attorney Allison Riggs to the North Carolina Court of Appeal. Riggs will complete the term of Richard Dietz, who won election to the North Carolina Supreme Court last November as part of a Republican sweep of statewide judicial elections. Riggs has made a career of...

The North Carolina Democratic party saw significant movement in their party leadership recently, with more likely to come. WRAL’s Paul Specht in a long-winded but excellent report, which I encourage everyone to read in earnest,  discussed the departure of the state Democratic party executive director Meredith Cuomo and Democrats’ perspective of this year’s election. While...

The U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures the power to regulate congressional redistrictingThere are different interpretations of how to define “state legislature”No matter which interpretation the U.S. Supreme Court uses in Moore v. Harper, the best and most likely outcome of the case is a narrow decision in favor of the North Carolina General AssemblyThe United...

WRAL recently came out with an editorial on Moore v. Harper, a United States Supreme Court case on who gets to draw North Carolina’s congressional districts. The editorial started with this gem: In January, when North Carolina’s U.S. House of Representatives members take their seats, the delegation will reflect the people of state [sic] it...

The Civitas Partisan Index (CPI) is a measure of the partisan tendencies of North Carolina legislative districtsThe CPI proved to have solid predictive data in 2022Several factors, most notably the red wave election in North Carolina, explain how Republicans won in several Democratic-leaning districts in the electionNorth Carolina’s 100 county boards of elections conducted their canvasses on...

Boards of elections in all 100 North Carolina counties will soon begin their biennial list maintenance. They will collectively remove several hundred thousand inactive registrations from the voter rolls. Before that happens, there’s an opportunity to take stock of the changing voter registration data in our state. We will look at changes from November 28,...