Candidate in battleground North Raleigh district isn’t eligible to run, complaint says

The Republican candidate for a key state legislative seat in the Raleigh suburbs — one of the few competitive N.C. Senate districts anywhere in the state — doesn’t actually live there, a new complaint against him alleges.

E.C. Sykes ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2020 and this year is challenging Democratic candidate Mary Wills Bode for a seat in the state Senate. Unlike for congressional races, candidates for the state legislature must live in the district they’re seeking. And Sykes does not, according to a challenge filed Wednesday and backed by the Democratic Party.

“Article II, Section 6 of the North Carolina Constitution requires that he have been domiciled of the district for one year before the election,” the complaint says. “Mr. Sykes did not live in the district on Nov. 8, 2021, and does not live there today.”

Private investigators followed Sykes for days and reported that he was sleeping, and otherwise appeared to be living, at the same North Raleigh house he’s lived in ever since moving here from Texas in 2019.

But that house is not where he’s registered to vote. Nor is it in the district he claims to live in and wants to represent in the state Senate.

Instead, the complaint alleges, the address he claims as his primary residence was little more than an abandoned lot when he first switched his voter registration there, and remains uninhabitable to this day.

Reached Thursday by The News & Observer, Sykes said he couldn’t comment because he was out at the polls for the first day of early voting. After this story published online Friday, he sent a written response, saying he and his wife are in the middle of building a house there. He said they have been living on a camper at the construction site instead of at their home — which is located in a different, and deeply Democratic, state Senate district.

The investigators following Sykes did note the camper on the lot, but claimed it had no electrical hookup, and that neighbors signed sworn affidavits saying they had rarely seen him there — and never in 2021, but only since about April 2022.

Sykes disputed all of that. The timing is particularly important, given the state’s requirement for a candidate to live in his or district for at least a year.

“We have been living there since last fall; it has electricity, gas, water and Wi-Fi,” he wrote. “I’m registered to vote there. My wife and I have hosted our grandsons there for extended visits.”

Why this race matters

The district Sykes and Bode are competing for, Senate District 18, starts just outside the Interstate 540 beltline in North Raleigh. It covers neighborhoods around Falls Lake, plus the towns of Rolesville and Wake Forest. The district also includes all of Granville County, which stretches from the Wake County border north to the Virginia state line.

As is the case with some other suburban districts around the state, the election is expected to be a nail-biter this year. Most seats in the state legislature are more or less predetermined, but this is one of the few that could go for either party.

Outside analyses of past election results show it leans barely left, with voters in the district favoring Democrats by maybe 2% in a normal year. So if 2022 is a better-than-average year for Republicans, the GOP would hope to win the district — and potentially a supermajority in the Senate, allowing Republican lawmakers to override any vetoes from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

A Senate supermajority requires 30 seats, and Republicans currently have 28. So flipping this seat is a high-priority target for the GOP.

The current incumbent, Democratic Sen. Sarah Crawford, chose to not run for reelection to the Senate this year but instead is running for a seat representing the same area in the N.C. House.

Running on the Democratic side to replace Crawford is Bode, a local attorney who previously led an anti-gerrymandering group, North Carolinians for Redistricting Reform.

“North Carolinians deserve quality, local representation for their community in the General Assembly — as is entitled to them by our state constitution,” Julia Walker, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, wrote in an email. “Legally, if Mr. Sykes has misrepresented his presence in the community and has not resided in the 18th district for the past year, he is ineligible to serve as their state senator.“

The complaint was filed by Todd Stiefel, a philanthropist and prominent Democratic donor whose family’s skincare company in Research Triangle Park sold for nearly $3 billion in 2009. Paperwork supporting the complaint indicated he filed it at the request of the N.C. Democratic Party. The complaint doesn’t indicate who paid for the investigators who tailed Sykes.

A trailer with no electricity?

The house where the investigators said Sykes appears to be living is in a suburban neighborhood not far from Millbrook High School, where he has an American flag flying and sometimes can be seen with his dog, or washing his car in the driveway.

But that’s not where he’s registered to vote. It’s also not in the Senate district he’s running for.

Sykes is instead registered to vote at an address that is inside the district. On paper, that makes him eligible to run for the election — but the complaint against him says there’s no way Sykes, a wealthy business executive, actually lives at that address.

“In early 2022 Mr. Sykes placed a travel camper, with no electrical connection, on the property but it is not suitable for living nor has anyone been seen there regularly,” the complaint says, citing not only the investigators’ reports but also sworn affidavits from several neighbors.

The complaint goes on to note that it appears Sykes has since started building a house on the lot. But it’s still not legal to live in, lacking an occupancy certificate, so he continues living at his other house outside the district, the complaint states. Public records from the county show it’s only about halfway through the permitting process, as of Thursday.

Sykes, however, said he really has been living at the address since last year, and that his camper does have electricity.

But even if Wednesday’s complaint turns out to be accurate, it came in too late to potentially force Sykes out of the race. Ballots had already been printed — early voting began Thursday — so state law says the complaint will automatically be put on hold until after the election.

Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the N.C. State Board of Elections, wrote in an email that “the election will continue as planned, and the county board would consider the protest after the election.”

If Bode wins, then the complaint is moot anyway — pending any potential criminal investigation for voter fraud. But if Sykes wins, the Wake County Board of Elections would start investigating his residency.

“When a protest is filed, generally the winner will not be issued a certificate of election until the protest is resolved,” Gannon said.

If their investigation agreed with the complaint, and found he doesn’t live in the district, the N.C. State Board of Elections could step in and potentially order a new election to be held, similar to what happened in 2018 and 2019 after an election fraud scandal in the 9th Congressional District involving the late political operative McCrae Dowless.

Similar complaints unsuccessful

Sykes is not the first N.C. Senate candidate this year to face a residency challenge.

Democratic candidate Valerie Jordan appeared to live in Raleigh, even though she was running for a district that stretches from Warren County to the Outer Banks, Republicans alleged. They used some of the same types of allegations Democrats have now launched against Sykes, after monitoring where Jordan slept at night and what she otherwise appeared to treat as her home.

However, that complaint went nowhere. Jordan said she has a home in the district where she’s running and that she was only temporarily living in Raleigh to care for her grandson. The State Board of Elections voted to accept that and allow her to remain on the ballot.

The vote was 3-2 along party lines, with all the Democrats on the election board voting to allow Jordan to run, and both of the Republicans objecting.

This also isn’t even the first time a politician has been accused of claiming to live on an empty lot. In that case, the complaint also went nowhere.

In 2018, elections officials investigated the Republican candidate for sheriff in Columbus County, Jody Greene, but ultimately allowed him to be sworn in after he won the election by a few dozen votes. Greene — who also hired Dowless for his campaign that year — was also accused of not living in Columbus County. He has a home in South Carolina, and the address he claimed to live in inside Columbus County was an empty lot where he parked an RV with a South Carolina license plate, The N&O reported.

Greene told county elections officials he was planning to build a house on the lot, like Sykes is saying now, and the complaint was dismissed. Greene has since faced other scandals, including an investigation into allegations of racist statements he made about his Black deputies after taking office. He was recently suspended from office by a local judge.

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