What counts as stealing an election in North Carolina? | Opinion
With four children, I have refereed enough backyard ballgames to know how things tend to play out. One child falls behind, and before long he insists that the only possible explanation is, “You cheated.”
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No parent finds this impulse mysterious. But part of growing up is learning to distinguish an unfair contest from an unwelcome result.
Adults are susceptible to the same temptation, though we usually dress it up in more sophisticated language. North Carolina supplied its latest example when Gov. Josh Stein warned fellow Democrats that Republicans were positioning themselves to “steal an election.”
He followed that by vetoing House Bill 958, which he said would invite “sore losers” to overturn elections by throwing out votes. A fundraising email from U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper similarly warned that Republicans were preparing to overturn future results.
The only surprising thing here is how ordinary it all sounds. Accusing your opponents of preparing to steal an election is not simply a dramatic way of saying their bill is bad. It means they are trying to take power they did not win. But we hear the charge so often now that it barely registers.
Before “stolen election” loses any useful meaning, it is worth asking what conduct the phrase should actually describe.
One feature of our low-trust populist era is the conviction that losing must mean the game was rigged. Disappointment is increasingly attributed to malicious systems rather than poor choices, failed arguments or bad luck. Like the child in the backyard, the explanation is comforting more than anything. Our side did not lose. The system betrayed us.
The progressive left has long described voting rules it opposes as voter suppression or attacks on democracy. Parts of the postliberal right treat major institutions as so thoroughly captured that an unfavorable result is itself evidence of corruption. President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election is the most obvious example, but it’s far from the only one.
Each accusation makes the next one easier to deploy, until “the election was stolen” becomes a routine explanation for losing rather than an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
Stein and other Democratic leaders can speak in apocalyptic terms because most people will never read House Bill 958. Technical legislation gives partisans room to substitute frightening labels for less exciting details.
The actual changes in this bill are so minor as to be difficult to track. The most significant one is that the bill shortens North Carolina’s early-voting period for primaries from 17 days to 10. It also allows early-voting ballots to be challenged until 5 p.m. on the third business day after Election Day. Under current law, a challenge to an early voter generally must be made while that voter is casting a ballot in person. Absentee ballots, by contrast, may be challenged for up to five business days after the election.
Democrats have a fair objection. Their voters have often been more likely to vote early, so a Republican legislature shortening the period can look like partisan gamesmanship.
But the change leaves general election early voting untouched. In a primary, Democrats and Republicans are not competing against each other. Each party is choosing its own nominees. That makes it difficult to construe the change as an attempt to suppress the other party’s votes.
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There is also a practical problem with keeping early-voting sites open for the full 17 days. County boards must recruit workers and staff and equip every site, even during days when remarkably few voters appear. Election officials have described primary turnout during that stretch as slow and sporadic.
In 2024, the first seven days accounted for just 10% of all primary ballots. The final two days alone drew more voters than the entire opening week. In 2026, the final two days nearly matched the first seven.
Democrats may still prefer 17 days, but 10 days remains a substantial voting period. This is a reasonable disagreement over election administration, not evidence that Republicans are preparing to steal an election.
The child who cries “cheater” merely because he lost presents one problem. There is also the child who realizes he is losing and announces that the rules have changed. His team gets another turn, a point that counted before no longer counts, or the next score suddenly wins the game.
That sounds much closer to actually stealing a win. North Carolina went down this road after the 2024 election, when Judge Jefferson Griffin launched a lengthy legal battle to overturn the result of his state Supreme Court race.
Of course, he had every right to scrutinize the extraordinarily close 2024 race, seek recounts and challenge ballots he believed were unlawful. The problem came when he sought to invalidate thousands of ballots cast by voters who had followed the rules election officials gave them, based on interpretations advanced only after the votes were cast and the outcome was known.
That is fundamentally different from changing election law for the next election. It is a distinction worth preserving.
Can we agree that this should be the line? Legislatures may change election laws for the future, and those changes deserve scrutiny. But losing candidates should not retroactively disqualify voters who followed the rules they were given.
If every disputed voting bill is an attempted theft, the accusation will mean little when someone truly does try to change the rules after the game is over.
The lesson from the backyard cuts both ways. Do not accuse someone of cheating merely because you lost. And do not change the rules once the outcome turns against you.
It is elementary advice. Our politics keeps supplying reasons to repeat it.
Andrew Dunn is a regular freelance columnist for the Charlotte Observer and News & Observer of Raleigh. Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at [email protected].
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