North Carolina State Board of Elections: MAGA’s Committee To Rig The Rules

Francis De Luca, Stacy Eggers IV, and Angela Hawkins are the three Republicans who run the North Carolina State Board of Elections, the five-member body in charge of the state's elections and its 100 county boards. None of the three won an election to get this power. They have it because the Republican legislature, weeks after voters elected a Democratic governor in 2024, stripped the governor of the power to appoint the board and handed it to a Republican who quickly appointed a MAGA-aligned majority. The new board then fired the director who ran the last two elections and hired Sam Hayes, the GOP House Speaker's lawyer.

The newly-installed Republicans have used their power to rewrite the rules in the GOP’s favor. This isn't election administration. It's a con job with a gavel, run by people who can't win a fair fight in North Carolina and know it.

Worst moments:

• Fired the executive director who ran the 2020 and 2024 elections and replaced her with the Republican Speaker's general counsel.
• Posted new absentee rejection rules the day ballots went out and voted them through hours later, applying standards state law says start in 2027 to ballots already in the mail.
• Cooperated with a DOJ lawsuit rather than fighting it, leading to a settlement that puts nearly 100,000 voters at risk of being removed from the rolls.

Connection to the election denial movement

Francis De Luca, Chair. For 10 years De Luca ran the Civitas Institute, the Raleigh think tank bankrolled by Republican megadonor Art Pope that spent the Obama years manufacturing the voter-fraud narrative North Carolina Republicans used to pass a 2013 voter ID law. A federal court eventually struck down the law for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision.” Civitas under De Luca “routinely cited and applauded” the Voter Integrity Project of NC, which “has been known for repeatedly challenging the registrations of voters — largely people of color — for allegedly being noncitizens, claims that were rarely verified.” A 2012 Civitas post told readers VIP “is making a difference and you can too.”

Soon after being elected chair, De Luca endorsed the logic of Republican Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to overturn his 2024 loss in a State Supreme Court election. Referring to Griffin’s lawsuit, which attempted to throw out over 60,000 ballots, De Luca said that it raised important questions that the state legislature is “going to have to address.”

Stacy “Four” Eggers IV, Secretary. Eggers has been on the State Board since 2018, and has proven his utility to Republicans seeking to undermine fair elections. In late 2024, when Jefferson Griffin brought his attempt to overturn an election loss by throwing out tens of thousands of votes before the NCSBE, Eggers was part of the minority that voted to discard the votes.

Angela Hawkins. The newest member, Hawkins chaired the Wake County Board of Elections and was working with State Auditor Dave Boliek’s office training new Republican county board chairs when Boliek put her on the State Board.

Sam Hayes, Executive Director. The board's day-to-day boss is a party loyalist straight from the office of Republican House Speaker Destin Hall. As general counsel in the Speaker’s office, Hayes played a role in the passage of the legislation that stripped NCSBE appointments from the governor, gave the power to an official that the legislature trusted to pack the board with extremists, and ultimately paved the way for him to assume his current position.

Influence over election administration

The State Board of Elections is the agency where the ability to influence North Carolina’s election administration is most highly concentrated, and the MAGA faction that dominates the board has not shied away from using their authority to tilt the playing field in Republicans’ favor.

On September 4, 2026, the morning North Carolina sent out mail ballots for November, the NCSBE posted new rules for throwing out absentee ballots. The board quickly rammed them through, passing the rules over the objections of the two Democrats who had actually overseen the 2020 and 2024 elections. The rules apply stricter rejection standards that the legislature intended to start in 2027, and were so controversial that they received enough objections to trigger an automatic delay in their implementation, requiring the board to circumvent the law to enact them. County officials reportedly warned that up to one in five absentee ballots could be affected.

In May 2025, the DOJ sued the NCSBE over registrations submitted on a faulty form, seeking to have the affected voters removed from the rolls. In contrast to the board’s previous majority, who fought against a similar lawsuit filed by the North Carolina GOP, the current majority cooperated with the federal government by opposing the intervention of voting rights groups and eventually agreeing to a settlement. The settlement endorsed the NCSBE’s “Registration Repair Project,” which Democracy Docket reported puts roughly 98,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement.

Looking ahead, the State Board also rules on protests like Jefferson Griffin’s 2024 attempt to reverse his own loss by throwing out more than 60,000 votes. In 2024 a Democratic majority stopped him, but the NCSBE’s newly-constituted majority may not do so for similar challenges to 2026 results.