NC Senate Republicans Blast State Elections Director for Sketchy 2020 Lawsuit Settlement that Changed Absentee Voting Rules

RALEIGH – A N.C. Senate committee invited N.C. State Board of Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell to testify on a 2020 lawsuit settlement that went around the General Assembly to change absentee voting rules and weakened security measures. The two hour hearing featured Republican committee members “roasting” Bell, as one local news outlet put it, over the extraordinarily sketchy actions her Board took just prior to the 2020 general election.

One member, Sen. Carl Ford (R-Rowan), wondered aloud, why the committee should not ask for her resignation? It’s a good question.

Back in the fall of 2020, in the lead up to the election, Democrats leveraged the ‘Sue til Blue’ strategy once again. Infamous partisan hack and attorney Marc Elias was the weapon of choice, launching lawsuits in swing states across the country to weaken mail-in and absentee voting rules and helping to flood the Democrat vote. All under the guise of COVID cautiousness, of course.

But in North Carolina, Elias didn’t need to win the lawsuit. All he needed to do was get the partisan Democrat State Board of Elections, the Democrat NC attorney general, and, of course, Democrat Governor Roy Cooper to reliably ‘settle’ the lawsuit in a way that got them what they wanted. And that’s exactly what happened. It’s almost as if they colluded to bypass the state legislature and change the law for political gain…

The changes made effectively eliminated the signature requirement on absentee ballots, and also extended the acceptance date for absentee ballots until several days after the election — the same kind of changes Elias and the Left were able to ram through bureaucratically in state’s like Pennsylvania.

The federal judge that was overseeing the original lawsuit chimed into point out that he specifically forbade them from eliminating absentee ballot signature requirements, and the settlement effectively did just that. He did let the acceptance date changes stand, which earned Bell and the Board another lawsuit alleging they illegally circumvented the legislature to change the law.

Bell maintained to committee members that the Board was allowed to settle a legal matter, as if it the fact that said settlement changed the law was irrelevant. Lawmakers let her know on Tuesday what they thought of that logic.

“When you change a rule that changes a law, the law has been changed,” said Sen. Joyce Krawiec (R-Forsyth). “I just find it amazing that you still believe that you didn’t change a law.”

It is quite unbelievable, but Bell’s other excuses may be even more so. She also defends the lawsuit settlement as not changing the law, or the rules for voters, in an explanation that defies all sense of reason.

Even the Democrats’ media defenders like PolitiFact rated those whoopers ‘Mostly False.’

Bell was further grilled about her partisan loyalties, old Twitter accounts, and whether or not she believes trust and integrity to be important in elections. On the latter, lawmakers made it clear that her actions, regardless of whether she and the Board believed them to be technically legal, undermined that election integrity and damaged trust in elections.

Election integrity is one of North Carolina voters’ top priority issues according to recent polling.’

In the end, Bell took the lashing without so much as admitting a mistake. And why would she? Whether openly colluding or not, professional partisans like Bell, Stein, Cooper, Elias, et. al, all knowingly work toward the same end and exploit the same abuses and overreaches to get there. They played their part in North Carolina, and now the Left gets to call Republicans vote suppressing racists for having to clean up the mess they intentionally made.