NC election board chair peddled election denial and unsubtantiated voter fraud claims

The 2024 elections left North Carolina Democrats with much to celebrate. While the perennial battleground state followed national trends with voters picking GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Democrats won the governorship and four other Council of State offices, as well as a state supreme court race that the GOP candidate just conceded this week. Democrats also gained a seat in the state House, breaking a Republican supermajority and weakening the ability of GOP lawmakers to override the Democratic governor’s vetoes.

It’s against this backdrop that Republicans in the General Assembly voted last December to transfer oversight of North Carolina’s elections from the governor to one of the state offices won by Republicans in 2024: the N.C. State Auditor, led by newly-elected Dave Boliek.

After months of legal wrangling, last week an anonymous three-judge panel — without a hearing, written opinion, or official signatures — approved the Republican plan, making North Carolina the only state in the country where the state auditor appoints election board members. The day after the ruling, Boliek used his new authority to appoint a 3-2 Republican majority.

Chairing the new election board is a figure who is no stranger to election controversies in North Carolina: Francis De Luca, a retired marine and long-time conservative activist in the state. With backing from GOP mega donor Art Pope, De Luca has pushed unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud and advocated for aggressive voter restrictions in North Carolina — many of which were ultimately struck down in court.

“We’re very concerned,” Bob Phillips, executive director of the democracy advocacy group Common Cause North Carolina, told Facing South. “The [N.C. election board] should be about what we all want, making voting accessible for all registered voters in North Carolina. [De Luca’s] track record doesn’t suggest that that’s what he is about.”

Spearheading hysteria about unsubstantiated ‘fraud’

A native of Jacksonville, N.C., De Luca rose through the ranks of the conservative movement in the 2000s as North Carolina director of Americans for Prosperity, a leading right-wing group back by the Koch family, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative campaigns and causes.

The North Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity was launched by Art Pope, a retail magnate and close associate of the Koch’s. As Facing South and the Institute for Southern Studies documented, in the 2000s Pope erected an influential political network of think tanks, media outlets, and electoral groups that would shift North Carolina politics sharply to the right.

In 2007, De Luca moved to the Civitas Institute — another key advocacy group in Art Pope’s network — and became president a year later. Under De Luca’s leadership, Civitas emerged as a leading voice in North Carolina for sharp restrictions on voting access, based on unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. De Luca left Civitas in 2018 and unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Congress the next year. In 2020, Civitas merged with another Pope-backed group, the John Locke Foundation.

As reported by Facing South, the Civitas website published dozens of articles using baseless or overblown fraud allegations to call for a strict photo ID law, an end to same-day registration during early voting, and a shorter early voting period.

In 2014, for example, Civitas made headlines with claims that more than 35,000 voters in North Carolina had double-voted in other states. “They verified there was voter fraud," a Civitas spokesperson declared. “They identified tens of thousands of voters that potentially voted in North Carolina and another state.”

But the bold allegations weren’t grounded in reality. The numbers came from the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a troubled voter verification outfit run by then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The program was shut down in 2018 after growing evidence that it had wrongfully flagged tens of thousands of legitimate voters.

As it turned out, the 35,000-plus votes Civitas and Crosscheck claimed were fraudulent were simply cases of citizens sharing the same names and birthdates. When Social Security numbers were factored in, the number fell to 765 — many of which were likely due to poll worker mistakes or voter errors. In the end, despite Civitas’ fraud hysteria, the North Carolina elections board referred just 31 cases of possible fraud to county prosecutors, with only 19 involved votes cast in multiple states.

The Civitas Institute also amplified extreme election denial groups like the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, founded by retired Air Force officer Jay DeLancy. DeLancy launched VIP-NC after parting ways with True the Vote, which reportedly distanced itself from him after the organization “raised concerns about his anti-immigrant leanings”. DeLancy has been known for repeatedly challenging the registrations of voters — largely people of color — for allegedly being noncitizens, claims that were rarely verified after analysis by election officials.

But the Civitas Institute under De Luca routinely cited and applauded DeLancy’s and VIP-NC's work; an August 2012 blog post was typical in calling on readers to get involved in the group’s efforts, saying, “[Voter Integrity Project] is making a difference and you can too.”

‘Monster’ bill advocate and challenging early votes

In 2013, De Luca and Civitas also took credit for the passage of House Bill 589, a sweeping elections package dubbed the “monster” law by democracy advocates. The bill included a strict photo ID requirement; decreased early voting days; eliminated pre-registration opportunities for 16 and 17-year-olds, same-day voter registration, and out-of-precinct voting; and eased rules on Big Money political spending.

A federal appeals court would later rule that the bill targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision,” and much of the law was invalidated in 2016.

When asked about Civitas’ role in the passage of H.B 589, De Luca said, “I’d like to think we had a little hand in it.” Not only had Civitas been a key proponent of many of the voting restrictions in the law; Civitas’ political arm, Civitas Action, had spent more than $275,000 backing Republican lawmakers who passed the bill.

Shortly after the law was struck down, De Luca and Civitas told county election boards to cut back on early voting days in the run-up to the 2016 elections. De Luca openly admitted that he opposed early voting because he thought it helped Democrats, and Republicans scaling it back was just “partisan politics” and therefore fair game: “So now all 100 Republican-controlled county boards of elections can be just as political with it,” De Luca said. “Remember, it’s partisan politics, it’s not racial or anything.”

“That’s pretty chilling,” Bob Phillips of Common Cause said this week, reflecting on those comments. “It’s not a partisan game in terms of voting. It should be something that everyone works together on trying to make sure we have the best voting system and election administration in the country. That type of attitude is not healthy.”

In another attack on North Carolina’s early voting laws, in 2016 De Luca and Civitas took aim at the state’s provision, passed in 2007, that allows voters to register and vote on the same day during early voting. In 2016, after Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost his re-election bid, Civitas sued to have 90,000 votes thrown out that were cast using same-day registration. “We think same-day registration is bad policy,” De Luca said.

Civitas’ lawsuit came as McCrory’s campaign attempted to disqualify more than 100 votes cast by Democrats in the 2016 elections, refusing to concede. Most of the accusations were later dropped or disproved; four voters would go on to sue McCrory’s lawyers for defamation. Civitas later dropped its suit challenging votes cast by same-day registrants.

Decorated elections executive director ousted

At the same meeting this week where the new GOP-majority election board elected De Luca as chair, they also fired award-winning executive director Karen Brinson Bell. Bell had earned national accolades during her six years in the director role, navigating state elections through the COVID pandemic, hurricanes, and a period of intensifying threats against election officials. She was elected by her national peers earlier this year to become president of the National Association of State Election Directors in 2026.

While it’s not unusual for the executive director to reflect the board’s partisan majority, the firing paired with the GOP’s unprecedented scheme to shift control to a state office with no experience administering elections drew sharp criticism. David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, described the move as a “highly partisan power grab” that has “resulted in the removal of one of the most highly respected election officials in the country.”

When Bell asked to give a short outgoing speech, De Luca said no, abruptly ended the meeting, and left the room along with the two other Republican board members. Bell went on to share her remarks with the remaining Democratic members of the board and others in the room, which included the following:

I’ve worked in the elections field at all levels over the past 19 years. This is a very different environment that I hope can be restored to the civility that once existed. I hope we can get to a place in this country, and especially in this state that I hold so dear, where dedicated, hardworking election workers are supported and rewarded for their work, rather than vilified by those who don’t like the outcome. I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence. And I hope we recognize that the conduct of elections is the very core of our democracy and should be properly and consistently funded, regardless of the party or the person in control, so that the voice of the people can be recorded accurately, securely, and fairly.