- "The State Board of Elections is committed to following the letter of the law in every matter before it, regardless of political considerations, and to applying statutes uniformly across all counties and candidates," wrote Francis De Luca, Chairman of the State Board of Elections.
North Carolina State Board of Elections Chairman Francis De Luca sent a letter Thursday to House Minority Leader Robert Reives responding to Reives’ criticism of the board’s handling of a candidate eligibility dispute in the Wilson County sheriff’s March primary.
The disagreement stems from the board’s decision to override a county ruling that barred Wilson County sheriff candidate Bobby Knight from the March Republican primary ballot after he briefly, and inadvertently, switched party affiliations in early December. State law bars party affiliation changes within a 90-day window before the election, so Reives criticized the Republican-led state elections board in a statement published on Medium, while De Luca’s letter seeks to explain and defend the board’s vote.
“The State Board’s decision was grounded squarely in North Carolina General Statute § 163-82.17,” the letter reads. “That statute governs the effective date of voter registration changes, including party affiliation, and establishes when such changes are legally recognized for purposes of candidate eligibility. After reviewing the record and applicable law, the Board determined that Mr. Knight’s brief registration in party affiliation was accidental and thus not applicable to the statutory prohibition period for candidate filing. Accordingly, the Board concluded that his candidacy is still in compliance with North Carolina law.”
“While we recognize that many media reports regarding this appeal have characterized the Board’s decision as inconsistent with state law, those accounts have not fully explained the statutory framework or the specific application of § 163-82.17 in this case,” wrote De Luca. “We offer this clarification to ensure that you and your colleagues have a complete and accurate understanding of the legal rationale supporting the Board’s decision and can remain confident in the integrity and consistency of election administration in our state.”
Knight, a senior deputy in Nash County, briefly changed his voter registration to Democrat within the 90-day window before filing as a Republican. He told a Raleigh news outlet that the switch lasted only a few hours and happened accidentally when he pressed the wrong button on the DMV website while updating his voter registration address on his phone in December.
Party-affiliation disputes have occurred before, often because of delays and mismatches between DMV records and local boards of elections. Similar issues arose in Buncombe and Pasquotank counties and were ultimately resolved in favor of the candidates, who had properly registered to run for office. In those cases, the party-affiliation dates recorded by the DMV did not match the dates recorded by local election boards — a recurring problem that has caused ongoing confusion.
In Knight’s case, the county Board of Elections initially ruled Knight ineligible. However, on Tuesday the Republican-led North Carolina State Board of Elections overruled that decision in a 3–2 vote, allowing Knight to remain on the GOP primary ballot and sparking criticism from Democrats who say the board ignored clear legal requirements.
Reives, D-Chatham, condemned the board’s action as a breach of state law and part of a larger pattern of controversial decisions by the elections board that could undermine confidence in election administration.
“North Carolina voters deserve to know that the State Board of Elections is following the law when they make important decisions about candidate eligibility,” Reives wrote earlier this week. “Republican leadership showed how far they were willing to go when they challenged Allison Riggs’ victory in 2024, threatening to throw out valid ballots in order to change the outcome of a decided election. This is a slippery slope and a bad start for this partisan election board.”
The dispute lends new scrutiny to the ongoing struggles with administrative processes involving North Carolina’s elections and motor vehicle agency.
The federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to offer voter registration opportunities at driver-license offices. However, it does not obligate states to provide a way to change voter registration through the DMV.
“We’re required under federal law to register voters through DMV, but we’re not required for them to do affiliation changes,” said Rep. Bill Ward, R-Pasquotank. “It’s really my opinion that they shouldn’t be doing changing affiliations through DMV because of the lag time and then the questions that rise out of that.”
“I mean, you don’t go the Board of Elections to get your driver’s license, so why are you changing affiliation through DMV? I think it’s something we at the General Assembly will have to look at, and we’ll probably look at it when we go back into short session,” Ward added.
That criticism comes amid a period of institutional friction between the NCSBE and the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles. In recent months, the NCSBE has pressed the NCDMV for expanded access to Social Security numbers for voters in DMV records. NCSBE director Sam Hayes wrote a letter in December saying the information is needed to match voter rolls more precisely against other government databases, identify duplicate registrations, and verify eligibility. Hayes cited Section 303 of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which mandates that election officials and motor vehicle agencies enter into data-sharing agreements “as needed to verify the accuracy of voter registration information.”
To date, the DMV has reportedly not provided that information to the NCSBE.
