(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
With people’s trust in elections being influenced by whether their preferred candidates win, former NC elections director Karen Brinson Bell said it’s important for voters to look at history.
For North Carolinians, that means remembering that voters split tickets and that it’s routine for Democrats and Republicans to win statewide elections.
“North Carolina was purple before purple was a thing,” said Brinson Bell, who participated Friday in an online forum on trust in elections sponsored by the media organization Votebeat.
“We had one of the most conservative U.S. senators in Jesse Helms serving at the same time as one of the more progressive governors that North Carolina has ever had in Jim Hunt,” she said. “That just speaks to North Carolina voters.”
In 2020, when Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump, Republicans in every state were “grumpy” about elections, with Republicans in states where Trump narrowly lost a bit more unhappy than the rest, said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT. At the same time, Democrats “believed election officials could do no wrong,” he said.
“Distrust in elections is more likely to be driven by national rather than local events,” he said.
Former NC elections director Karen Brinson Bell participates in a forum on trust in elections. (Photo: Screenshot)
Polls found that Republicans’ confidence in election results increased after Trump won last year,
But Seth Bluestein, a Republican on the three-member commission that runs elections in Philadelphia, said he feared that trust is not sustainable.
Trump made unsupported claims last year about cheating in Philadelphia, which officials had to refute, Bluestein said. Once the polls closed and it was clear Trump won the state, those accusations stopped.
National leaders need to “tone down the rhetoric,” he said.
“What I see is the national rhetoric from party leaders filtering down and being repeated by legislators, who are then trying to pass laws that will actually make election integrity worse, or make it harder for elections officials to run the elections at the county level,” Bluestein said.
Brinson Bell noted that she started her tenure as North Carolina elections director after a ballot harvesting scandal in a congressional race and ended it with a candidate for state Supreme Court refusing to concede his narrow loss. She was talking about Republican Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, though she did not mention him by name.
“The transparency was there, the data was there, people could understand that this election had been conducted fairly, yet the candidate did not concede until May of 2025,” she said.
Griffin had challenged more than 60,000 votes, many because he claimed voters did not included required identification numbers on their voter registration forms. After the case meandered through state and federal courts, a federal district judge said the effort to throw out votes was unconstitutional and ordered Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, be certified as the winner.
The US Department of Justice sued the Board of Elections this year over the missing voter registration identifiers. Elections officials are working to collect the numbers from voters. The DOJ and the state settled the case.
Though confidence in elections is rising, there are now more grassroots groups that profit from fomenting dissatisfaction than there were in 2020, Stewart said.
“Even if confidence gets better, there’s the rest of the process that leads to the chaos that we observe,” Stewart said. “I think the situation is kind of dicey these days.”