ICYMI: Try And Stop Us Exposes the Republicans Rigging North Carolina’s Election

North Carolina was the first state in the country to mail ballots for the 2026 election. That same morning, the Republicans who seized control of the State Board of Elections posted new rules to throw more of them out. This week, Try And Stop Us put names and receipts on every Republican behind the scheme.

Here’s what you may have missed:

North Carolina Republicans spent a decade building a plan to rig this election, and they’re running it now. A new Interested Parties memo from Try And Stop Us lays out the scheme step by step. Weeks after voters elected Gov. Josh Stein, the outgoing Republican legislature passed a power grab ripping away elections oversight from the Democratic governor and making the Republican state auditor the only auditor in the country who runs elections. Speaker Tim Moore told Steve Bannon it would “deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket.” The auditor installed a new GOP-majority board that fired the director who ran the 2020 and 2024 elections, flagged about 100,000 voters for Trump's DOJ, rejected most Sunday early voting hours, and blocked early voting on numerous college campuses. Republicans lost the governor's race and lost a Supreme Court seat even after trying to toss 60,000 ballots. Rather than compete for votes, they decided to change who controls the count and how many ballots survive it. Read the memo →

State Auditor Dave Boliek hijacked North Carolina’s elections and handed the keys to a GOP operative. Boliek, who said he was “only in politics for” Donald Trump, used his new power to flip all 100 county boards to Republican majorities. He then appointed Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the state GOP, as his “eyes and ears on the ground.” Records obtained by American Oversight show Woodhouse pushing counties to drop Sunday early voting and telling county chairs what the state Republican Party wanted. In August, Boliek sat down for two hours with election deniers to hear their plans for the midterms, then asked them to keep it from the press. Read the Conspirator File →

The three Republicans running the State Board of Elections never won a single vote to get there. Chair Francis De Luca spent a decade at the Art Pope-funded Civitas Institute manufacturing the voter-fraud narrative behind a voter ID law a federal court struck down for targeting Black voters. Secretary Stacy Eggers IV voted to throw out 60,000 ballots to help Jefferson Griffin overturn his loss. Angela Hawkins was training Boliek’s new Republican county chairs when he put her on the board. Together they sided with Trump’s DOJ against voting rights groups, producing a settlement that puts about 100,000 voters at risk. Read the Conspirator File →

Senate nominee Michael Whatley turned “election integrity” lies into a voter suppression operation. As North Carolina GOP chair, Whatley claimed “massive fraud” in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia after the 2020 election. As RNC chair, he deployed 200,000 poll watchers and put the party’s “election integrity” division under a fake-elector scheme participant. His RNC sued to purge 225,000 North Carolina registrations, the same theory Trump’s DOJ later used to force the settlement. Trump likes him because he’s “a stop the steal guy.” Read the Conspirator File →

North Carolina voters are taking the Republican board to court. The North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans, North Carolina Asian Americans Together, Down Home North Carolina, and two voters sued the State Board of Elections over the rules it rammed through the day ballots went out. The rules force counties to toss ballots with an unsealed inner envelope and impose signature checks with no standards. A board member estimated 3% of ballots could be discarded. The plaintiffs warn the rules will cause “arbitrary disenfranchisement.” Read more →