RALEIGH – Once state officials start asking current or former state legislators where they sleep at night, and whether their spouses sleep with them, I would respectfully suggest that they have drifted into the “way too much information” category. But that’s not far removed from what state and local elections boards have found themselves doing in recent years while adjudicating challenges to the qualifications of candidates running for North Carolina House.
For the 2006 cycle, two such disputes involved Republican primary challenges. In House District 15 on the coast, former state transportation board member Tommy Pollard filed against longtime incumbent Robert Grady in the GOP primary. To the west, in Iredell and Davie counties, there looked to be a rematch in House District 79 between Republican incumbent Julia Howard and the former legislator she defeated in 2004, Frank Mitchell.
In both cases, the incumbents (allied to a greater or less extent with Richard Morgan) argued that the challengers, Pollard and Mitchell, did not truly live in the districts they sought to represent. And in both cases, the incumbents prevailed – Pollard and Mitchell were disqualified as candidates, leaving Grady and Howard unchallenged and likely to return to the House in 2007.
Pollard and Mitchell provided evidence that they had moved into residences within the 15th and 79th districts, respectively. They admitted, however, that they maintained ownership interest, personal belongings, and Mitchell’s case a business operation at properties outside their districts. At issue, in part, was the definition of “residence.” Several questions arose. What kind of evidence is required to prove one’s residency? Does residency assume exclusivity in living arrangements? A number of lawmakers and candidates maintain multiple residences throughout the year, including vacation homes and rooms or townhomes in Raleigh where they stay during legislative sessions.
Unfortunately, it often seemed difficult to distinguish between arguments made in good faith and arguments bound up in the larger Republican struggle over the Morgan faction’s role in the party. For example, defenders of Pollard and Mitchell insisted that the two candidates met the legal definition of residency (though that remained murky, to say the least) but could not with a straight face argue that it was the intention of the framers of current law to allow these kinds of candidacies. On the other hand, defenders of Grady and Howard, indignantly insistng that the incumbents were the victim of unscrupulous political enemies, could not with a straight face deny that the House districts in question had been carefully and shamefully gerrymandered in an attempt to exclude specific Republicans from being able to challenge the incumbents.
One approach to heading off such disputes in the future is contained in a new bill that clarifies both the definition of residency and how it is to be legally proven. While welcome as a clear standard, the bill doesn’t address the other aspect of the dispute: the misuse of redistricting power to protect incumbents not just from effective challenge by members of another party, which is bad enough, but also from challenge by specific potential opponents.
I have a suggestion on this front: perhaps North Carolina ought to adopt the same policy for state legislative races as currently applies to congressional races. You do not have to reside in a congressional district in order to seek to represent it in the U.S. House. If we adopted the same approach, challenges on residency would lose their significance altogether, and voters could simply evaluate the candidates on the basis of personal characteristics, talents, and positions on issues.
Many parliamentary countries have never insisted on strict residency requirements. And in the congressional case, the current system doesn’t exactly threaten representative government. Virtually all candidates who live outside their districts still lose – perhaps because voters don’t much like the idea. Voters would still be free to disregard the issue, if they viewed other factors as more important in their decision, and would likely evaluate rather differently a candidacy by someone from the same town, but just outside the district line, as opposed to a candidacy by a true interloper from elsewhere in the state.
Of course, the far-bigger problem of gerrymandering for partisan and incumbency-protection reasons would remain. By eliminating the residency issue, however, we might clean up the redistricting mess at least a little bit.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.