The 2023-24 session of the North Carolina General Assembly delivered a host of policy victories for the John Locke Foundation, including changes to the law advocated for by Locke’s Civitas Center for Public Integrity. Those wins include but are not limited to the 2023 budget (which included several policy reforms for which Locke had advocated), numerous election law changes in House Bill 747, and the passage of the citizen-only voting constitutional amendment.
Locke’s Civitas Center will advocate for further reforms in the 2025-26 session. Unless otherwise linked, the policies listed below come from part of Locke’s North Carolina Policy Solutions 2024-25 or one of our research reports: Reforming North Carolina’s General Assembly, Limiting Gerrymandering in North Carolina, and What Happened in 2020. Some of the language below comes directly from those Locke publications. Recommendations from other sources will include links to those sources.
This is a partial list and does not include reforms that should be made by the State Board of Elections or other parts of state government.
Reforming the Legislature
- Leadership Term Limits: Impose eight-year lifetime term limits for speakers of the House and presidents pro tempore of the Senate.
- Session Length Limits: Setting a June 30 end date for regular sessions would make long sessions of roughly 90 legislative days and short sessions of roughly 35 legislative days. The General Assembly would sometimes meet in special sessions to address veto overrides, declared state emergencies, or court decisions requiring an immediate legislative response
- Legislator Pay: North Carolina’s current legislative salary of $13,951 makes it more difficult to recruit candidates who are not retired or independently wealthy. That salary could be raised to $20,533.70 at no cost to taxpayers if combined with session limits or to $34,400.50, the median salary for hybrid (between part-time and full-time) state legislatures like North Carolina’s
- Legislative Transparency: Repeal or modify the provision in the 2023 budget that made legislators the sole judges of which documents they produce are public records.
- Transparency Constitutional Amendment: Put a transparency constitutional amendment on the ballot to cover all three branches of state government. It should require a supermajority for the legislature to exempt itself from transparency laws and include a “clearly outweighing” standard that would favor public disclosure unless the interest served by nondisclosure outweighs that of disclosing a record.
Voting Procedures
- Illegally Transmitted Ballots: Require the State Board of Elections to bring its policy more in line with North Carolina law by instructing county election boards at least to make inquiries about the origin of illegally transmitted ballots they find in their possession.
- Disabled Voter Protection: A 2022 court ruling allows anyone to take control of a disabled voter’s ballot if the voter provides consent, making those voters vulnerable to ballot harvesters. A state law passed in 2024 authorizing members of Multipartisan Assistance Teams to take possession of ballots in areas affected by Hurricane Helene should be made permanent and applied to the whole state.
- Absentee Ballot Request Deadline:
To give voters adequate time to request, receive, and return their mail ballots by election day, the statutory deadline for requesting an absentee ballot should be moved from “not later than 5:00 p.m. on the Tuesday before the election” to “not later than 5:00 p.m. on the second Thursday before the election.”UPDATE: Senate Bill 382, passed in December 2024, includes a provision moving the deadline to request absentee ballots to the second Tuesday before election day. This belongs in the policy win section. - Literacy Test: Put up for a vote of the people an amendment removing the literacy test from the state constitution.
- Early Voting Period: Require counties to have one Sunday of early voting and reduce the number of early voting days from 17 to 10. Doing so would reduce the burden of early voting on counties without negatively impacting voter turnout and give voters equal access to early voting in every county.
- Hand-Marked Paper Ballots: Require all counties to use hand-marked paper ballots (with touchscreen options for disabled people).
Election Administration
- Candidate Disclosures: Remove the exception clause in the statute governing the Felony Disclosure form and require that candidates who knowingly fail to disclose their felony convictions be removed from the ballot. Add language to disclosure laws so that they apply not just to legislators and other elected officials but also to candidates for those offices as well
- Procedural Audits: Expand the audit the State Board of Elections submits to the General Assembly to include a procedural audit of voter registration, election operations, and a verifiable paper trail, similar to what some call a “forensic audit.”
- Independent Audits: Create an organization housed in another state government body, such as the Office of the State Auditor, or a private organization accredited by the state to conduct at least some sample or random “spot audits” of election results and procedures.
- Sample Hand-to-Eye Count: Correct the flawed current sampling method for the sample hand-eye recount by either apportioning counting units by county population or (once other reforms are in place) moving to risk-limiting audits.
- Duplicate Registrations: Election officials do not have the resources to remove duplicate registrations quickly, and there is no category for duplicate registrations in the SBE’s Voter Challenge Procedures Guide. Amend G.S. § 163-85 (c) by adding a category specifying that citizens can challenge registrations they believe are duplicates.
- Candidate Withdrawals: Impose a standard withdrawal deadline for all candidates of 57 days before election day. Adjust the date for sending the first mail ballots to 46 days before election day so that candidate withdrawals would not require ballot reprinting.
- HAVA Numbers: The General Assembly should not have to pass a law requiring election officials to try to collect missing voters’ driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of the social security number of people who have registered since 2004. State law already says, “The county board shall make a diligent effort to complete for the registration records any information requested on the form that the applicant does not complete.” If the SBE continues to refuse to tell county boards to collect those numbers, perhaps legislators could change the law to “The county board shall really, really make a diligent effort…”
Redistricting
(It is not too early to create rules for redistricting after the 2030 census. It may be easier to reform the process now, while both sides are less sure which party will control the General Assembly when maps are drawn.)
- Data Restrictions: Forbid the use of voter registration data or data from past election results. Prohibit using voters’ demographic data, except to measure compliance with the U.S. Voting Rights Act after districts are drawn. Do not consider the addresses of incumbents when drawing districts.
- Stephenson Process Constitutional Amendment: The rules established by Stephenson v. Bartlett limit how much legislators can gerrymander state legislative districts, especially in rural areas. They also minimized splitting counties to favor one party in the redistricting process.
- Traditional Criteria: Maintain and tighten traditional redistricting criteria, including making districts compact, minimizing precinct (voting tabulation district) splits, and avoiding splitting municipalities within county boundaries.
- Transparency: As was done under court order in 2019 and voluntarily in 2021, the actual drawing of districts should be done in open legislative meetings on computers that members of the public can see in-person and online.
- Congressional Redistricting: Consider a Stephenson process for congressional districts to reduce the number of county transversals and limit gerrymandering.
We advocate for these and other reforms as part of the Civitas Center’s mission to “improve the trustworthiness of North Carolina’s democratic institutions and, as a result, increase the public’s faith in those institutions.” Reform is often a multi-year struggle, but we hope at least some of these proposals will become reality in the upcoming legislative session.