A partisan tug-of-war at the state level has had some spillover effects on the local boards of elections in Alamance and other counties in North Carolina.
As of Tuesday, each of these five-member bodies has a Republican majority for the first time since 2016 as the GOP-led General Assembly consummates a hard-fought bid to strip Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, of his control over the state’s electoral machinery.
In Alamance County, this legislative restructuring has resulted in the appointment of a third Republican member to replace one of the Democrats who had served on the county’s board of elections. In the meantime, the board’s chairmanship has passed to Republican Kevin Harrison, who had been the board’s newest member prior to Tuesday’s partisan realignment.
An assistant district attorney by trade, Harrison has served on the local board of elections since 2024 when he was tapped to replace former Republican appointee Bryan Ray, who gave up his position last year to mount a successful campaign for district court judge.
Coincidentally enough, Harrison had also been a contender for the party’s nomination when this particular judgeship became vacant in the opening months of 2024 following the abrupt resignation of former district court judge Brad Allen. The Alamance News reported at the time that the executive committee of the local GOP had split 29 to 12 in Ray’s favor when he and Harrison competed to be the party’s standard bearer for Allen’s former position.
Harrison acknowledges that he hadn’t been deeply involved in the local GOP before he was selected as Ray’s successor to serve on the board of elections. The Alabama native had nevertheless made a name for himself during his six years as a prosecutor as well as the five years he had previously worked as an attorney in private practice.
Harrison ultimately owes his appointment as chairman to North Carolina’s state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican whom the General Assembly has entrusted with naming the electoral officials once picked by the governor. Boliek was initially delayed in assuming this role when a trial court declared that the legislature had unconstitutionally abrogated a power which the governor has traditionally held. Since then, the state’s court of appeals has reversed this decision, allowing Boliek to proceed with his new duties.
Boliek went on to release a slate of new local election board chairmen on Tuesday – with Harrison occupying the top slot thanks to Alamance County’s preeminent place in any alphabetized list of the state’s 100 counties.
In addition to Harrison’s elevation to chairman, the GOP has chosen Ben York, the one-time chairman of its local organization, to serve as the party’s third representative on the county’s board of elections. York and Harrison will serve alongside fellow Republican Gary L. Jackson as well as Democrats Homer Ashby and Elaine Berry – the latter of whom was the board’s chairman before the recent state-level shakeup.
The only casualty of this partisan shift is Democrat Noah Read, who had been the board’s longest-serving member as well as its secretary before he was bumped from his seat. Dawn Hurdle, the county’s election director, said that she and her colleagues tried to give Read a proper send off when he showed up for his final meeting as a board member last week.
“Our last meeting was the 17th,” she recalled, “and we had a little party for him.”
The new Republican-majority board will convene its first meeting on Tuesday, July 22.
In the meantime, the local election office has been bracing itself for some of the other changes that the state’s newly Republican-controlled board of elections has in the offing.
Hurdle conceded that state-level officials have agreed to do the heavy lifting for the first of these measures, which aims to update the registrations of 200,000 North Carolina voters whose records currently lack driver’s license or social security numbers.
“We had a meeting this morning with the state,” the county’s election director recounted on Wednesday, “and from our understanding, the state will be reaching out, by mail, to the voters who didn’t have proper identification.”
Hurdle added that some of the affected voters had registered before the state enacted its current identification requirements, while others have records that are incomplete or fail to match up with the information in state and federal databases.
Hurdle said that the state’s efforts to update these records may be a huge time saver in the next high-turnout election since fewer people will presumably complete the so-called “provisional” ballots that are offered to anyone who isn’t on the voter rolls in the precinct where they turn up to vote.
“The law has changed so that we now have to do the provisionals within three days of the election,” she added, “and I’d rather do it now when we aren’t so rushed.”
