Stacy "Four" Eggers Eliminates Sunday Voting in 10 More NC Counties

 

Photo Jesse Barber

 

Yes, we see you, NCGOP. We see you as through a glass, darkly.

Lynn Bonner for NCNewsline:

Ten North Carolina counties that had Sunday voting in the last midterm election won’t have any this year as a result of state Board of Elections votes this week. [Four Eggers of Boone is part of the Republican majority on the board.]

The state board met Thursday [Aug. 20] to consider early voting plans for 20 counties where local boards of election could not agree on locations, dates, or times.

The Republican majority on the state Board of Elections agreed with decisions of GOP majorities in Anson, Chatham, Columbus, Greene, Harnett, Nash, Pasquotank, Pitt, Union, and Wayne – counties that opened polls on Sundays for voting four years ago – to drop those hours this year.

Thursday’s decisions continued the contraction of Sunday voting since Republicans took majorities on the state Board of Elections and county boards last year.

Watauga's Own "Four" Eggers Shuts Down Investigation into Dallas Woodhouse's Voter Suppression Activities

 

Photo Jesse Barber

 

Last Thursday, with Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") presiding over the State Board of Elections (SBOE), Jeff Carmon, one of two Democratic members, spoke about the allegations that preceded Dallas Woodhouse's resignation as Auditor Dave Boliek's enforcer ("liaison") to all county boards, going over and around the actual staff at the SBOE. It had become well established that Woodhouse was behind orders in some specific counties advising the closing of early voting at college campuses and an end to Sunday voting in Black communities.

“Given the seriousness of these allegations and the public attention that they have generated, I believe we have an obligation to establish a complete and factual record,” Carmon said. “At this stage, I believe the board has little choice but to subpoena Mr. Woodhouse so that he may answer questions under oath.”

Eggers was horrified and shut that shit down quickly, refused to allow a vote on a subpoena for Woodhouse, arguing hilariously that it would be inappropriate to go after Woodhouse now because he's resigned his job and is a private citizen. What? When Carmon pointed out that Woodhouse's official actions were the point, not his private behavior, Eggers retreated to a threat, warning Carmon that he'd better "drop it," before the Republican majority called for investigating people who ran the SBOE for Roy Cooper and Josh Stein. (Will Doran, WRAL)

This is the same Four Eggers who secretly directed efforts to suppress the college vote in Watauga in 2013 after his younger brother was installed as the chair of the Watauga BOE. Bertrand Gutierrez scooped that scandal for the Winston-Salem Journal, and I used up a lot of bandwidth writing about Mr. Eggers and his attempt to change the entire landscape of voting in Watauga County. The first meeting of the Watauga BOE after the Republicans took over, August 12, 2013, a huge crowd had been alerted that something bad was about to go down. The meeting room was standing room only, so they moved to the main courtroom. The Republican majority proceeded to pass a dozen or more "resolutions" (changes in policy) that were proven later by digital thumbprint to have been ghost-written by the chair's big brother Four. One of those resolutions closed early voting at AppState. That meeting, with that crowd, became a raucous circus of protest, with cat-calling and boos. The lone Democratic member of the Watauga BOE said damn twice, and it was captured on video. The Civitas people alleged that the Democratic member "cursed through the whole meeting." An exaggeration that nevertheless summarizes adequately the vibe of that day.

That decision to close AppState early voting, on appeal, was upheld by the SBOE, also Republican majority at that time. A non-profit, the Watauga County Voting Rights Taskforce, and individual plaintiffs, sued in Wake Superior Court to restore the student union site. On October 13, 2014, literally on the eve of the start of early voting for the fall elections of 2014, the senior resident judge Donald Stephens issued a sharply worded decision declaring the Watauga BOE's shutdown at AppState "arbitrary and capricious." The next morning, and just as quickly as the judge had ruled, the staff of the Watauga BOE was set up in the student union and ready for early voting. We were first in line. And we've had early voting on the AppState campus ever since because a judge ordered it. (Q. Does a judge's order have a limited lifespan? How is that determined?)

Couldn't do it in Watauga in 2014. But willing to let Dallas Woodhouse do it in 2026. Same "Four" Eggers.

 

The Man Who Shut Down Early Voting at Western Carolina

 

Bill Thompson, presiding

 

 

Bill Thompson, the new Republican chair of the Jackson County Board of Elections, has managed to establish an early reputation as a nasty piece of work. But isn't that the way Phil Berger and Tim Moore intended election administration to go in North Carolina? They changed the law, put themselves in charge of elections, and just naturally attracted the meanest and most partisan people to make things as difficult as possible.

As chair of the Jackson BOE, it was Thompson who led the nasty move of killing an early voting site at Western Carolina University. “ By law, we could have just one site in Jackson County,” Thompson warned, ignoring evidence that the WCU early voting site was the most used in the county. “One site is required for every 30,000 voters. We've got four, that's plenty.”

Two complaints were lodged with the NC State BOE against Bill Thompson for his conduct in a Cullowee precinct polling place during the March primary. A voter, seconded by two other witnesses, and an actual poll worker both filed complaints on the second day of early voting, saying Thompson came into the polling site talking trash about Muslims and saying that both Germany and France were ruined now because of the Muslim invasion, and that he especially didn't trust Germans. The poll worker who heard all this was born in Germany and he summed up the grief  brief against Bill Thompson, that "he exposed deep and unfounded disgust against Muslims and their faith as well as any non-European culture.”

Bill Thompson's not the first bigot to chair a board of elections, but still....

The NC BOE on March 25th (last Wednesday) held an initial review to determine whether the complaints against Thompson "presented sufficient evidence of misconduct or a violation of election-related duties." The board voted 4-1 that the threshold had not been met. One Democrat voted with the Republican majority, though she lectured Thompson: "We're cautioned not to bring politics into the polling place, and discussions of politics. At least one of those instances cited in the complaints is arguably a political commentary, or brings in issues that really have no place in a polling place.” But she agreed to let him off the hook.

Republican SBOE member Stacy "Four" Eggers did give Thompson a highly decorous, because indirect dressing-down:

"Mr. Chairman, I think it is worth cautioning the chair [Thompson] as to his discussions, choice of words and what he chooses to discuss at the polling place. I know that Miss [Angela] Hawkins [another Jackson Co. board member] and I both have spent a lot of time in county precincts, and generally the discussion is limited to the weather, or perhaps your favorite sports team or something innocuous like that.

“Although the comments were not appropriate for the discussion in the area, they still, in my mind, don't show a violation of Chapter 163.” 

I suspect this may not be the last dressing-down that Bill Thompson will be needing.

 

Apparently, Dallas Woodhouse Gives Stacy "Four" Eggers the Heebie-Jeebies

 

Woodhouse

I asked the question recently: How does State Board of Elections (SBOE) member Four Eggers feel about the appointment of Dallas Woodhouse as the "election integrity czar," seemingly above and over the heads of the duly designated SBOE board.

I believe we got at least a partial answer in the heated yelling match that broke out during a discussion of Woodhouse's appointment at a SBOE meeting last Tuesday. (I tried to tune in via WebEx, but problems with over-talking and the sound system made listening not only a challenge but a sheer pain. So I have to go with what's reported by Lynn Bonner on NCNewsline.)

After Democratic member Siobhan Millen began the discussion of Woodhouse's appointment -- “It’s difficult to imagine a person who would be less suited to bringing election integrity…” -- SBOE Chair Francis DeLuca "began to shout over Millen as she criticized Woodhouse’s hiring."

Once the shouting died down, Eggers spoke and appeared to side with the two Democrats, though gingerly, like a cowboy trying to gentle a wild horse: “Our county board members should take direction from this board,” Eggers said. "It’s clear that the board retains legal, technical, and supervisory oversight over elections."

But maybe, Eggers added, "Woodhouse might be helpful in securing funding from the legislature."

Hahahahaha

Oh, Woodhouse is going to be useful all right, but not for more funding.

Dallas Woodhouse Now in Charge of Election Integrity in North Carolina

 

Woodhouse

News came last week that the state Auditor Dave Boliek, the newly established Republican overlord of voting in North Carolina, appointed Dallas Woodhouse to a special role enforcing "election integrity" (the code word) via "election policy and proper oversight." What exactly that "oversight" means, especially considering Woodhouse's history and the clear undertow of Republican ambitions to limit voting ahead of the midterms rather than encouraging it, has many progressives and independents alike very concerned.

Who the Hell Is Dallas Woodhouse?

Woodhouse is famous as a hard-charging Republican operative with a history of chair-flinging partisanship. Ahead of the 2014 senatorial contest between Thom Tillis and Kay Hagan, Woodhouse created a 501(c)(4), Carolina Rising, ostensibly under IRS rules as a tax exempt "social welfare" org, but most of the $4.9 million he raised went to a single political media firm in Virginia for ads mentioning Thom Tillis favorably. Carolina Rising listed a single anonymous donor for all that money. The donor later turned out to be Karl Rove's super-PAC, Crossroads GPS. Complaints were filed with the IRS that Carolina Rising was clearly a partisan operation. I don't know if anything substantive came of those complaints. Probably not. (On the night of Tillis's election in 2014, Woodhouse appeared before cameras famously and slurringly quite inebriated, bragging that he had spent well over $4 million to get Tillis elected. That video may still be on YouTube.)

In October of 2015 Woodhouse was hired as executive director of the NCGOP. In that role, in August of 2016 Woodhouse famously sent an email to all Republican members of county boards of election reminding them that with Pat McCrory as governor, they had the power to manipulate early voting plans for "Party-line" outcomes. Both McCrory and Donald Trump would be on the ballot that fall, and Woodhouse was doing his due diligence to manufacture wins for those guys by helping to suppress Democratic votes where possible, particularly Sunday voting favored by many Black churches, and student voting, facilitated by polling places on college campuses. McCrory lost but Trump won that year, so partial success for Woodhouse's team.

After Woodhouse stepped down from executive director of the NCGOP in 2019 -- damaged flotsam from the bribery scandal involving party Chair Robin Hayes (Woodhouse was never implicated) -- he joined both the John Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute as a paid consultant/staffer. Those two influential North Carolina purveyors of big-money conservative orthodoxy kept Woodhouse in the inner-circle of the Republican establishment. The old Tea Party types, best represented by the opinion stylings of Brant Clifton at the Daily Haymaker, don't like him, don't trust him, especially after Woodhouse managed to oust Hasan Harnett from the GOP chairmanship less than a year into his term).

(Use the search engine, top left, for many more instances and details recorded on this blog during the last decade for assuming that Woodhouse's appointment as overseer/enforcer of voting rights statewide will mean an open field day for suppressing the Democratic vote everywhere possible, all the time, forever.)

How Do the Republican Members of the State's BOE Feel About Woodhouse's Appointment?

Dunno. But I can speculate. 

There are three Republican members of the SBOE, all appointed by the aforementioned Dave Boliek in his new role as Elections Czar: 

Stacy "Four" Eggers IV from Watauga; 

Ex-Senator and Yankee transplant Robert Rucho, who can justifiably wear the label of "wacky right-wing hothead." DeLuca had a huge hand in fashioning the "Monster Voting Law" in 2013, which was soon defeated in court for suppressing the vote of Black citizens; 

Francis X. DeLuca, a one-time congressional candidate and former boss of Art Pope's right-wing Civitas Institute -- the org which, according to NCNewsline, "has long and passionately championed dozens of extreme (and sometimes downright strange) causes," including suppressing access to voting in the interests of "election intrigrity."

I've been listening to SBOE meetings via Webex. Most recently I heard Chair DeLuca suggest that Federal elections law (the HAVA Act) is probably "insane." He had just been told, in fact reassured by SBOE legal counsel, that the procedures by which the SBOE is repairing the missing data from several thousand voter registrations is entirely by the book and according to the law). Robert Rucho had complained that the law wasn't strict enough and implied that all sorts of fraud is going on all the time.

How does Four Eggers feel about the appointment of Dallas Woodhouse, and how is Eggers parsing who gets to demand what? Boliek's memo appointing Woodhouse implied but didn't spell out that Woodhouse has some sort of fiat over not only the county boards but the SBOE itself. Is Eggers going to bend the knee to an "election intrigrity compliance dictator" who's been put in above him and the SBOE? What are the legal ramifications when Woodhouse goes mucking about with 2024 early voting plans that include polling sites on college campuses?

 

How an Ulcerated Board of Elections (Mis)Behaves

 

Four Eggers

Video surfaced of the grim closing moments of yesterday's meeting of the new State Board of Elections. "New" in the hair-raising sense that it's now and very suddenly dominated by a 3-2 Republican majority (counting Watauga's Four Eggers) --  all appointed by a newly elected Republican hack Council of State member, Auditor Dave Boliek, just because the Republicans in the General Assembly still have a lot of revenge flowing through their capillaries, and they love torturing our new Democratic governor.

The moment the video memorializes is immediately after the Republican majority has terminated the employment of SBOE Exec. Dir. Karen Brinson Bell, who has run the operation only since June 2019 and who has been attacked by right-wing election deniers as a partisan Democratic operator, which is absurd. By every metric Brinson Bell was even-handed and above-board, and I might remind the election deniers that it was under her six years directing elections that Republicans maintained and extended their hegemony in the General Assembly. (I realize the tit-for-tat history behind Brinson Bell's appointment in 2019: The Democratic majority summarily fired the Republican Exec. Dir. at the time, Kim Strach, who had also been a fair and even-handed administrator (IMO). So I get the revenge, even though I don't believe in it.

So ... teeing up the video ... Brinson Bell has just been fired. One of the Republicans quickly moves for adjournment, and Brinson Bell requests a minute of their time to make a comment on her tenure as executive director. Instead of saying a gentlemanly "sure you may speak!" Four Eggers quickly seconds the motion to adjourn, and the Republican members all stalk out, like milk cows going to stall, while Brinson Bell begins reading her statement.

Worried that blindly and maliciously partisan drones have taken over the administration of voting and of voters and of elections in North Carolina? You bet I'm worried. Here's a very serious open question involving the barest operation of any imagination: What would have happened in the Jefferson Griffin v. Allison Riggs case if the Four Eggers crowd had been in control the whole time? When Griffin first started his bizarre legal theorizing -- that elections can be overturned by rewriting the rules later -- he made his argument about throwing out 60,000+ ballots first to the State Board of Elections -- 3-2 Democratic at the time -- which quickly rejected Griffin's arguments as belonging in the "You've Got To Be Kidding Me!" bin. 

NCGOP's Wet Dream of Controlling Elections Becomes Real

 

Four Eggers
Photo Jesse Barber

Four Eggers is so proud.

After a 3-judge panel of Superior Court judges ruled the Republicans' elections takeover law unconstitutional last week, three anonymous Court of Appeals judges (Jefferson Griffin rumored to be one of them, so there's a possible explanation for the secrecy) on Wednesday set that lower-court ruling aside (in an unsigned two-sentence ruling that offered no legal reasoning whatsoever) and completely green-lit the takeover of the State Board of Elections by a Republican hack, Dave Boliek, the new state Auditor.

What had once been the right of the duly elected governor to appoint the members of the State Board is now a part of the portfolio of a totally inexperienced but highly partisan official who is guaranteed to please his GOP bosses. The decision came from the Court of Appeals with no oral arguments, no public explanation or discussion, and no acknowledgment that this appallingly partisan decision has been previously considered unconstitutional by numerous courts who have understood a power grab when they saw it.

Yesterday, the new elections czar Boliek immediately appointed the three most partisan Republicans he was told to appoint, including the notorious Watauga County attorney Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") as the voting majority on the board. Boliek will also be privileged to appoint the chairs of all county boards, which are guaranteed to also turn majority Republican.

In addition to the travesty of judicial over-reach, we can now look forward to early voting plans that intentionally disable voting blocs disfavored by Eggers and his chums, among other mischief. There is also worry, naturally, that the new GOP power structure will find a way to award that Supreme Court seat to Jefferson Griffin.

Slicker Than Snot on a Doorknob, Four Eggers Gets Himself Back in the News

 

A famous cartoon by Andrew Cox for
The Appalachian, 2013

On Thursday, and again on Friday (May 11-12), Laura Leslie at WRAL published and then updated a scoop about two prominent Watauga Countians. Leslie found out that Four Eggers ("Stacy Clyde Eggers the Fourth") had secretly gone to the general counsel for the state Board of Elections (SBOE) and first suggested that SBOE member and current secretary Stella Anderson was ineligible for reappointment and then also suggested (possibly threatened, in that mealy Four Eggers way) that the state Republican Party would sue if she were reappointed to the board that Eggers himself also serves on. (It's a whole nother story about how two Watauga Countians ended up on the same important state board at the same time.)

Bottomline: Anderson, who told Laura Leslie that she fully expected to be reappointed and had been told by the governor's office that she would be reappointed, suddenly discovered that she was out in the cold because the governor's people were afraid of a lawsuit. (H1029, passed in 2018, prohibits state employees from serving, but after the enactment of H1029, Anderson was reappointed anyway because she was considered "grandfathered." She had already been serving on the SBOE when H1029 passed. Why, she now wonders, is she no longer grandfathered? Doesn't that question deserve litigating? Rather than instant retreat?

Four also challenged another Democratic SBOE member, Jeff Carmon, on the same grounds. Carmon teaches one class as an "adjunct" (part-timer) at NC Central. Serious question: Legally, can part-timers get around the state employment prohibition? Probably not, so Carmon actually quit his part-time teaching job to get reappointed.

NEW NEWS

Here's the kicker. Four Eggers is himself, according to his lawfirm's own website, "since 2005, a Certified North Carolina Criminal Justice Instructor through the Criminal Justice Standards Division and has taught continuing education classes to both the Appalachian State University Police Department and the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office."

Continuing Education classes at AppState pay their instructors. I feel pretty safe in suggesting that. So how exactly does Four Eggers stand apart from the same eligibility requirement that ensnared Jeff Carmon to stop teaching? How special is Four Eggers? And where does he get off, successfully manipulating the governor to not appoint his one nemesis on the SBOE, Stella Anderson, who likely knows election law a little more thoroughly than Eggers. She's a many-year veteran of both the county BOE and the SBOE, and her name is on the actual lawsuit (Anderson v. State Board of Elections, 2014)  that successfully reopened the ASU polling place that Four Eggers had tried very hard to get rid of.

A Jesse Barber photo

So it's not the first time that Eggers has been outed as a secret manipulator. He was exposed once before in a Winston-Salem Journal investigative article ("One County Attorney, Two Hats: Documents show attorney as 'author' behind key resolutions") on September 15, 2013, just a few months after Republicans (that is, Four Eggers) took control of the local BOE for the first time in a Protestant eternity. With his little brother as chair, and with Bill Aceto as wingman, Eggers immediately began driving Elections Director Jane Anne Hodges (with decades of experience) into early retirement and went to work suppressing the ASU student vote. He got famous on campus, which was not necessarily a good thing, and became a regular passenger on my personal ship of fools (I'm the friggin cap'n and the purser), this blog. I've written about Four Eggers probably more than I ever did about Donald Trump. Don't believe me? Search "Eggers" at the top of the page.

In response to Leslie's questions, Eggers admitted that, yes, he did go pay a visit to the SBOE general counsel's office, and yes he did raise the issue about Anderson and Carmon's eligibilities, but, he claimed, "it was not a challenge to the Democrats’ re-appointments." There's no paper trail proving he's working the angles for the NCGOP -- no official challenge from them. But I think it likely that Eggers was delivering -- in that unctuous, oily way of his -- a nevertheless clear (and obviously effective) threat from the NCGOP that he was recruited to deliver.

Either that, or he went rogue. Out of ambition and self-interest.

Be on the Lookout for a Trumpist Jerk in Your Polling Place This November

 

"We're here to be your poll observers"

On August 16, the State Board of Elections (SBOE) met and unanimously passed new, stricter rules on the behavior of partisan "poll observers," who are allowed by law to stand silent watch in precinct polling enclosures. There have been problems with some poll observers in the past, who have clearly intended their presence to intimidate certain voters or who have actually not kept silence but rather spouted something either incorrect about the voting process or something clearly partisan in nature.

The new SBOE rules (summarized by Will Doran in the News and Observer):

▪ Poll workers could be removed from duty for making political statements, telling voters falsehoods about how elections are run, or discriminating against voters based on their race, gender or other characteristics. 

▪ Observers would have to stay in specific areas at each polling place. State officials indicated this was to stop them from leaving to make private calls to party officials, getting into altercations with voters, or attempting to look at “confidential voter information” like someone’s filled-out ballot — all actions that drew complaints during the primary election this spring. 

▪ Observers would be banned from handing out any written materials to voters, or posting any fliers or signs. Campaign volunteers are allowed to do that nearby, but never inside the polling place.

That unanimous vote by the SBOE included the "aye" vote of board member Stacy "Four" Eggers, most famous in Watauga County for attempting to suppress the vote of college students starting in 2013, so his "aye" seems like a signal that the most partisan Republican walking sees the new rules as appropriate.

But not so the Trumpists behind an outfit called the Election Integrity Network, who say they've already trained over 1,000 partisan poll observers in their gospel that the 2020 election was stolen and that all sorts of bad people are being allowed to vote who shouldn't and that there's no way under God's blue sky that a Republican should ever lose a statewide election in North Carolina if everyone is honest.

The Election Integrity Network is being led by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, most famous for being on that call Trump made to the Georgia election officials demanding that they find a few thousand more votes for him. So Cleta, very unhappy with Four Eggers and the rest of the SBOE, appealed to the NC Rules Review Commission on Thursday to void the SBOE's action, which they did. Also unanimously.

The NC Rules Review Commission members -- all 10 of them -- are appointed by the Republican bosses in the NC General Assembly. Who are they? "Many are GOP insiders or former Republican politicians — including former state Sen. Bob Rucho, former state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson, longtime Jesse Helms staffer Wayne Boyles, Greensboro-based activist Jeffrey Hyde and several conservative lawyers from the Raleigh area" (Will Doran).

Apparently, the SBOE can take the matter to court, which we hope and trust they will.

New Sheriff in BooneTown?

 

A new Political Action Committee (PAC) -- calling itself "Appalachian PAC" -- has decided to get involved in the Boone Town Council races this year with endorsements (unclear at the moment whether they also intend to give direct money donations to individual candidates, but they're raising money). Their under-developed website brags that they're "non-partisan," but the evidence so far suggests something more complicated. With Bill Aceto and Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") as donors and guiding lights, "non-partisan" isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

"Oh, look, there's Luke Eggers too!" Photos taken at the PAC's "launch" party and posted to their Facebook page show a careful, mixed guest list, with Democrats and Republicans (for example, both Eggers and Tommy Sofield, who ran with the Republican team for Watauga County Commish in 2020) and independents -- some of whom might have more of an investment connection than a shared political ideology. The "launch" party was clearly weighted toward real estate brokers and business developers. 

I have questions about their goals, let alone their intentions. The website is short on policy statements, long on generalities that raise more questions than they answer: "Our goal is to elect pro-business and pro-university candidates in local and statewide elections." The banner across the top of their Homepage: 

UNIVERSITY • BUSINESS • COMMUNITY

The repeated emphasis on university, an odd leg on this three-legged stool -- that just stops me cold. AppState needs political help? Well, yes, in their view, which actually answers another question: How does the university need/use real estate developers? AppState and its 20,000 students are always needing habitation, and increasingly the university administration looks to the local rental market to supply a lot of their needs. Dormitories are expensive to build, expensive to maintain. And why go to that expense when there are plenty of developers ready to supply another kind of dormitory space -- stuff that advertises 4 bdrm/4 bath -- at no expense to the university but $700 a pop from the students who rent those units.

Some guys correctly identified the university as a cash cow many years ago.

I'm apprehensive if those same guys intend to make the laws of Boone more conducive to their goals.

Josh Howard Joins Trump's Legal Defense Team. He was Chair of State Board of Elections During Four Eggers' Attempt to Suppress AppState Votes in 2013

 

Everything old is new again.

Josh Howard was very much in the cast of characters during Stacy C. "Four" Eggers' seizure of the Watauga County Board of Elections in 2013 (using his younger brother as surrogate) and the attempt to shut down voting on the AppState campus.

Now attorney Howard has joined the Donald J. Trump defense team for the February 8th trial in the US Senate. The News and Observer calls him a "white-collar defense lawyer" with a definite partisan lean:

"He was part of the team that investigated Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s — both for the Whitewater financial scandal and the Monica Lewinsky affair. And he represented former Rep. David Lewis, once one of the most powerful Republicans in the state legislature, when Lewis was charged last year with federal crimes in a campaign finance scheme."

Josh Howard's a lucky lawyer, mainly because he's going to win this case before the Senate. Whether the Character Formerly Known as Twitterman actually pays him is another question.

 

 

Four Eggers (Likely) To Be on the State Board of Elections Again

 

Governor Roy Cooper's first choice for a vacated Republican seat on the State Board of Elections -- James Carlton "Carr" McLamb Jr. -- dissolved into an oily mist last night:

No reason was given for the swift about-face on the appointment, but in a statement, McLamb alluded to abuse allegations made against him.

"These anonymous allegations were launched against my character just hours after I was appointed to a partisan role that could have national implications," he said. "As a general rule, I do not respond to anonymous attacks, but let me be very clear, I never assaulted anyone or forced anyone into unwanted actions. I’m fortunate to have dated smart, successful women, and all of my relationships have helped to make me a better person." [Matthew Burns]

That left two other names nominated by the NCGOP: Stacy C. Eggers IV of Boone fame and Jeannette Doran, president and general counsel of the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law in Raleigh. Smart money says it will be Four who'll now become one of two Republican obstructionists on a board dominated by Democrats.

 

NCGOP Gets On Board With Trump: Absentee Ballots in NC Are Now To Be Considered Fraudulent

We know that David Black and Ken Raymond, the two Republicans on the state Board of Elections (SBOE), resigned from the board barely 24 hours after agreeing to changes to absentee-by-mail balloting to resolve complaints in two law suits. Black and Raymond, in their resignation letters, alleged that they were essentially duped into agreeing to the settlement. In response to those claims, the SBOE released the minutes of the closed session showing pretty conclusively that both Black and Raymond were active and willing participants in the discussions and agreed to all the changes.

If a judge approves the lawsuit settlement — which will be up for debate in court Oct. 2 — the new rules would make it easier for voters to fix problems with absentee ballots by signing an affidavit to confirm their identity, instead of having to start over from scratch with a new ballot.

The changes would also extend the number of days after the election that mail-in ballots could arrive and still be counted, and would tweak the rules surrounding the process for people to get a mail-in ballot but then drop it off in person, either at their county elections office or during early voting at a polling place. (Will Doran et al.)

We of course suspected that Black and Raymond had been forced to resign (because we may have fallen off the turnip truck, but we didn't land on our head), and Black's wife Deb totally spilled the beans on Facebook and removed all doubt: “... these resignations were not voluntary. They were told to resign. Sad times when republicans are firing intelligent and trustworthy republicans.”

The subtext for the forced resignations appears to be this: Black and Raymond, by participating in and agreeing to the legal settlement, were messing with the Trumpist message taking shape across the country: The November elections will be invalid/fradulent because of absentee voting. Senate Republican boss Phil Berger took up the cry with gusto, alleging that the changes to absentee-by-mail voting "is inviting folks to do things to game an election.” Do things. Classic Trumpist innuendo minus evidence.

Berger was just falling in line with the narrative launched by Trump two days earlier: "Get rid of the ballots!" Echoed one day  after that by the eternally flip-flopping Sen. Thom Tillis who vowed he had "grave concerns." Just two days earlier he had said he had so much faith in the absentee system that he challenged his Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, to vote by mail.

It's a unified front of Republican office-holders trying to invalidate the election ahead of time for reasons we perfectly understand, and David Black and Ken Raymond were inconvenient to the narrative.

Enter Stage Right ... Four Eggers

Raleigh reporter Tim Boyum reported this morning that Stacy C. Eggers IV, the "Four" of local voter suppression fame, is one of the names being pushed forward by the NCGOP as a replacement member on the SBOE.

Oh goody!

Lawsuit Is Filed To Stop New Valle Crucis Elementary School

Henri Deschamps, owner of the Mast Farm Inn in Valle Crucis, has filed for an injunction to stop the Watauga County School Board from buying the Hodges property adjacent to his business for a new elementary school. The proposed new school was the subject of a large joint public hearing before the school board and the Watauga County Commission on September 3 and has generated both heated opposition and support in the community.

Deschamps is represented by Robert N. (Bob) Hunter of the Higgins Benjamin law firm in Greensboro and by "Four" Eggers (Stacy Eggers IV) of Boone. Bob Hunter was appointed to the NC Supreme Court by Gov. Pat McCrory but was defeated by Sam Ervin IV in the election of 2014.

The Watauga County Commission will meet this evening at 5:30 and will take public comment on a proposal to change the Valle Crucis Historic District Ordinance to allow the building of the school on the Hodges property.

The Newest Republican Nominees to the SBOE

David C. Black of Concord -- Was the Cabarrus County Board of Elections chair. Otherwise, a blank slate.

Kenneth Raymond of Winston-Salem -- Was a Republican member already of the nine-member iteration of the SBOE that got dissolved last December 28th, so he and Four Eggers have already served together.

He's a black Republican popular with white Republicans because he bashes both gays and black voters.

Raymond gained his seat on the Forsyth BOE immediately after the election of Governor McCrory in 2013. Very early in his tenure, he made it clear that there would be no more early voting site on the campus of Winston-Salem State University (WSSU), and he floated the idea that sheriff's deputies ought to stand guard at polling places, maybe particularly those in majority black neighborhoods. He said he would recommend prosecution of any teacher or college professor who offered extra credit if students voted, particularly professors at WSSU. 

Raymond graduated from WSSU in 1987 with a degree in English and a minor in mass communications. He retired in April of 2017 after serving as a Winston-Salem Police Department 911 operator and dispatcher for 28 years. In July of 2017, and at the instigation of Republican state Senator Joyce Krawiec, Raymond was appointed to the Board of Trustees of WSSU, not without vocal protest from other trustees and alumni.

If It Were Me...
I'd appoint Four Eggers and Kenneth Raymond. You can ask me why, but I won't tell you. Isn't it obvious?

Bon Appetit! NC GOP Serves Itself Two New Turd Sandwiches

While You Were Ogling DeeCee...
Something else happened yesterday while you were possibly transfixed by the pre-dawn arrest of Roger Stone followed by the complete capitulation of DJT ("wall" has shrunk to "wah"). And didn't Nancy Pelosi show every man in Washington how to wear your balls out? Why did I ever doubt her?

Meanwhile, in North Carolina...

Dallas Woodhouse

1. Load, Aim, Shoot Your Eye Out

We had not even noticed that in their newest Board of Elections law, the Republicans in the General Assembly explicitly prohibited anyone serving on the board who had worked at "electioneering" in the past 48 months. Seriously. Dictionary definition of "electioneering": "the activity of trying to persuade people to vote for a particular political party."

Beyond the restoration of the 3-2 governor's-party architecture of the old old SBOE, I had no idea what else was buried in that law. Evidently, Dallas Woodhouse didn't know either. He's NC GOP Executive Director, and in contravention of his party's law, he presented two (of four) nominees for the SBOE who violate the explicit language of the statute, Francis Deluca and Buck Newton. Governor Roy Cooper actually knows what's in the law, and he demanded two more names, eligible people rather than partisan knights.

Though Cooper gave Woodhouse until Monday to produce two new nominees, Woodhouse coughed them up immediately and under the signature of Republican Party Figurehead Chair Robin Hayes. We'll follow up presently on those two new names in a separate post.

Woodhouse is ruthless but sloppy. Like Twitterman. I like that in an adversary.

Footnote
Four Eggers remains as a nominee, along with Dallas Woodhouse's cousin Eddie, who has served on the Wake County BOE.


2. "Is it me, or has it gotten hot in here?"

NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin announced he would be leaving the bench in February to become dean of the law school at Regent University, Pat Robertson's Christian mill in Virginia. Governor Cooper gets to replace him on the court (and that someone will have to run in his/her own right in 2020).

After the November election of Justice Anita Earls, the Court was 5-2 Democratic majority. With Cooper's ability to appoint Martin's replacement, it may now go to 6-1.

Relatively speaking, that's pretty huge. The NC GOP goes from trying hard the last two years to jury-rig the judicial system in North Carolina, to this:

NC GOP Nominates Four Eggers to New SBOE

Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four")

News broke late yesterday that the North Carolina Republican Party had nominated four people for the two Republican slots on the new new State Board of Elections (SBOE):

Col. Francis Deluca
Eldon Newton III
Stacy Eggers IV
Edwin Woodhouse Jr

Under the new new law, Governor Cooper must pick two of these people to serve with the three Democrats he'll also be choosing. Generally, a party presents their nominees in rank order, and Four Eggers is listed third, just ahead of NC GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse's cousin Eddie Woodhouse.

Also interesting: Of the four Republicans who served on the last incarnation of the nine-member SBOE, Eggers is the only Republican who made the cut, even though he was far from the most aggressive Republican on the old board, and he voted twice with the Democrats not to certify Rev. Mark Harris's election in the NC-9. That board was dissolved by court order on December 28.

Check the search engine above left and enter "Four Eggers" if you want to browse how he's famous in Watauga County.

The top two Republican nominees:

Col. Francis Deluca -- Until last spring, the president of the Civitas Institute. A big proponent of voter photo ID (and curiously, a bitter enemy of solar power). The "Colonel" honorific comes from 30 years of active and reserve service in the US Marine Corps. He flew combat missions in the First Gulf War. He stepped down from the Civitas Institute, but he remains deeply embedded with the Art Pope machine in the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (previously known as the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy). He takes a dim view of a whole bunch of stuff and has the requisite training to off his enemies.

Deluca was nominated early in 2018 to the first Republican General Assembly's incarnation of the SBOE, an eight-member board with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. By court order, that iteration was thrown out for a nine-member board, with one added Unaffiliated voter, and Francis Deluca was nominated for that one too. Gov. Cooper didn't pick him from among the Republican nominees.

He's supposedly considering a run for the NC-3 congressional seat that Republican Walter Jones is finally retiring from in 2020. Doubtful, since he allowed himself to be nominated again to the SBOE, which would preclude a candidacy.

Eldon Newton III -- Better known here and abroad as "Buck" Newton. He's best known as Attorney General Josh Stein's Republican opponent in 2016.

Newton graduated from Appalachian State University with a political science degree and went immediately to work for Jesse Helms. He won a seat in the NC Senate during the 2010 Tea Party wave and held onto it until announcing in late 2015 that he'd be leaving to run for Attorney General.

He made headlines in 2016 by loudly proclaiming his support for HB2 ("keep our state straight!" he shouted at a rally in Raleigh). His support for HB2 prompted this post on a Facebook thread:

"I knew Buck Newton when he was in college. He was always very opinionated, angry, looked down on others, always saw things in simple terms, always quick to jump to conclusions, always claimed things were 'common sense.' He was always very judgmental and used bully tactics on others to make his opinion appear correct. He was always full of confidence based on simple, black and white views of the world. Several of us thought he was an idiot because of his lack of ability to see and understand what was beneath the surface of issues. This bill/law [HB2] sounds exactly like something college-kid Buck would do. Apparently, he has not grown much. There are many smart and wise people in North Carolina who see God's creation as it truly is - a very complicated marvel, so it is absolutely shocking that such a person of low understanding could rise to such power based on such a superficial foundation. Shocking. At one point in time, the earth being flat was 'common sense,' blacks being inferior was 'common sense'... And, here we are... again."

Not for nothing did Buck Newton receive his perfect score from the American Conservative Union. He has voted to prohibit wind farms, to repeal the state's recycling program, to increase sales taxes on working families, and he has a 100% rating from the NRA (among many other things).

I look at these lists of nominees as a game of political chess. Dallas Woodhouse wants to force Cooper to appoint the top two, so he offers poison pills in the alternatives. Four Eggers would once again present the anomaly of having two members of the SBOE from Watauga, something that's made Gov. Cooper hesitate before. And Eddie Woodhouse? Dallas Woodhouse's cousin ... seriously? 

But if I were Governor Cooper, I think I would pick Four Eggers and Eddie Woodhouse. Meetings of the SBOE would be less colorful, perhaps, but the American carnage might be more manageable.

Alternative chess: Go ahead and pick Deluca and Newton, who then stage suicide missions for the sake of partisan advantage -- displaying once again what the GOP is all about. We can use the advertising. Whatever superior logic and argumentative powers Deluca and Newton are rumored to possess, it's doubtful the three-Democrat majority will be swayed.

Another consideration: It will take four members of the new new SBOE to order a new election in the NC-9. None of the four Republicans listed above are likely to provide that fourth vote. Conversely, it takes only a simple majority to refuse certification, so stalemate lies ahead, until a higher power orders a new election. Which can happen, I am persuaded.

What's Happening Right Now in Raleigh: "Game of Groans"

You know how many transformations the state Board of Elections (SBOE) has gone through since the Republicans seized power, each change either an attempt to seize more power or an attempt to lessen the sting of a negative court decision. Same for local county boards, currently at an impasse with 2 Dems and 2 Rs.

The most recent new legislation will take all boards of election back to majorities "of the party of the governor," with 5 members on both the SBOE and all county boards (majority of 3 Dems on each).

The problem has been down in the 9th Congressional District, where the putative election of Reverend Mark Harris has not been certified because of an investigation into ballot fraud. In the meantime the previous composition of the SBOE, which is holding Harris's certification, was supposed to expire weeks ago -- the 4 Dems, 4 Rs, 1 Unaffiliated iteration (with both Stella Anderson and Four Eggers of Watauga County representing the major parties). The 3-judge panel which ruled the current iteration unconstitutional had extended the life of the board twice, to give it time to rule in the Harris case.

Apparently, late this week, the 3-judge panel ran out of patience and refused to extend its stay for the dissolution of the 4-4-1 SBOE. The staff at the SBOE yesterday (a little after 3 pm) sent out this announcement:

Today at noon the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement ceased to exist after the three-judge panel in Cooper IV refused to extend the stay. The parties to the lawsuit had unanimously requested that the court extend the stay to allow the Board to conclude its investigation into irregularities affecting the 9th Congressional District.

Effective January 31, Session Law 2018-146 establishes a five-member State Board of Elections and eight-member Ethics Commission. Once appointed, County boards of elections will be made up of five members.

The governor and legislature appear to disagree on what happens to the board in the meantime. It is our view that the agencies go back to the way they were in 2016, prior to the legal changes that were struck down. This means the governor could appoint five board members from lists provided by the parties. These board members would serve until January 31. [emphasis added]

What this means is that for the moment county boards of elections do not have appointed members and therefore may not meet or conduct business.

We understand that Governor Cooper intends to appoint a 5-member SBOE on Monday that will conclude the Reverend Harris circus and that he has invited the two parties to make nominations immediately. We understand that Dallas Woodhouse and his GOP gang are claiming the governor has no such power (didn't Berger/Moore take all his power away, and if they missed this little piece, it was merely an oversight). So the Republicans might sue, and they might lose. We expect they will.

FOOTNOTE: The ballot fraud investigation in the NC-9 has become ever more Byzantine, and I gave up a long time ago summarizing every new piece of news about it. The SBOE hearing on the case is scheduled for January 11th, and I may be there to witness it. I suspect a lot of other people will be there too.

FOOTNOTE: The Rev. Mark Harris campaign yesterday filed in Wake Superior Court an emergency petition to certify his election. That won't work, as the courts can't take that power from the body endowed with it, and the Democrats in the US House have no intention whatsoever to seat Harris until the investigation into fraud is complete.

What the State Board of Elections Did Yesterday

Stacy C "Four" Eggers, member NCSBE, voted "no"
on every early voting plan except two.
Photo Lonnie Webster

At a rare Sunday afternoon meeting, the North Carolina State Board of Elections met in Forsyth County yesterday to hear 15 contested cases for Early Voting plans. Results in every case favored more access to Early Voting, with most votes going 5-4 along partisan lines (two unanimous exceptions noted below). Grateful to Loretta Boniti for keeping us informed yesterday.

Buncombe -- gets additional early voting site in black community

Dare -- gets Sunday voting

Durham -- keeps Sunday voting

Brunswick -- gets Sunday voting

Gaston -- gets Sunday voting (unanimous)

Gates -- gets expanded hours

Henderson -- gets Sunday voting

Lincoln -- gets expanded hours (unanimous)

Orange -- gets Sunday voting

Pender -- gets 25 Saturday hours and 20 Sunday hours

Pitt -- gets 80 Saturday hours and 20 Sunday hours

Randolph -- gets 4 early voting sites and 45 Saturday hours

Robeson -- gets more Saturday voting at more sites

Rockingham -- gets more sites

Wake -- gets early voting restored on NCSU campus

Republicans on Watauga Board of Elections Want Polling Places in Churches

Of course they do.

Mount Vernon Baptist Church currently serves as the election day polling place for New River 3, the second largest precinct in Watauga County. It was chosen as the polling place by Bill Aceto and Four Eggers (via Luke Eggers) obviously because...

a. It's as far away from the urban-suburban center of population in that precinct as you can get and still stay in the precinct. It's in the middle of the countryside, miles from the population center and without any public transportation to reach it.

b. It's a hotbed of Republican Party activists who make no bones that you can't be a Christian and a Democrat at the same time. This was the church marquee on the eve of the 2016 election. Voters either drove or walked by it on the way to vote.

Aside from the obnoxiousness, the inconvenience, the absence of logic, Mount Vernon Baptist Church is the perfect polling place for the 3,989 voters registered in New River 3.

Watauga Board of Elections Chair Jane Anne Hodges proposed moving that polling place back to where it used to be, the National Guard Armory, but Republicans Nancy Owen and Eric Eller weren't having it. In fact, Hodges proposed moving all three polling places currently in churches to non-church sites which would also be more convenient for voters, with easier access and plenty of parking:

New River 3

from Mount Vernon Baptist Church ... to National Guard Armory on State Farm Rd.

Brushy Fork

from Oak Grove Baptist Church ... to Caldwell Community College

Blue Ridge

from Laurel Fork Baptist Church ... to Deer Valley Racquet Club

Those moves aren't going to happen as long as both Owen and Eller, the Republican members, oppose. Precincts can be moved by majority vote, and both Chair Hodges and the other Democratic member, Richard Rapfogel, want this for the sake of convenience to the public and avoidance of conflict-of-interest or partisan intimidation.