NC Republicans question voting results. This time, it’s their own party’s elections

A lawsuit filed against the North Carolina Republican Party asks a Wake County court to nullify election results from the party’s 2023 state convention.

The lawsuit alleges “irregularities” involving violations of the convention’s rules and says the party is being hypocritical toward its own platform, which calls for elections that “are conducted with absolute fairness and integrity.”

The plaintiffs, three of the attendees at the June convention, say that a new mobile app used for the election of a chairperson allowed people who weren’t on the convention’s floor in Greensboro to cast votes. The convention reelected Chairman Michael Whatley.

The plaintiffs also say that Vice-Chair Susan Mills, because she was reinstated to another term without a vote at the convention, was not duly elected and therefore should not be in the role.

Through a spokesman, the NCGOP declined to comment.

“At the very least, the NCGOP’s Vice Chair is sitting in a position of power having not been elected in accordance with the Party’s Plan of Organization and the State Convention Rules,” the lawsuit reads. “The current NCGOP Chair was elected through a process that defied the on-floor, in-person voting requirements set out in the State Convention Rules, calling the Party leadership’s legitimacy into question, much less the NCGOP’s own public pronouncements regarding election integrity.”

Whatley himself has previously called for stronger election laws and “basic ballot protections.”

Whatley was first elected as chairman in 2019, reelected in 2021, and was named the general counsel of the Republican National Committee earlier this year. His tenure has seen Republicans win a supermajority in the N.C. General Assembly, as well as control of the N.C. Supreme Court. The state also voted for former Repubilcan President Donald Trump and Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Ted Budd in the past two elections.

Whatley’s sole opponent in this year’s election was John Kane, the son of a Raleigh real estate developer of the same name. Kane was endorsed by various influential NC business leaders as well as his father, as previously reported by Business North Carolina. Although Whatley officially won with roughly 60% of the vote, Kane told The N&O that the election was conducted “in complete violation of the rules set forth” at the convention.

“Whether it was driven by incompetence or malfeasance, I don’t think anyone can say, but the fact of the matter is that our state convention violated multiple rules blatantly,” he said. “If we’re a party who cares about the integrity of elections, we must hold ourselves to, at a minimum, the standard that we espouse in our governing documents.”

What happened in the NCGOP elections?

NCGOP leaders had a mobile app created specifically for the 2023 convention, in which delegates would be able to vote in the leadership elections, according to the lawsuit, which says the app didn’t track user location. Because convention rules state that only delegates on the convention floor could cast votes, the lawsuit argues that there was no way to know if people not on the floor had cast votes.

Affidavits submitted with the lawsuit allege voting happened off the floor. Jay DeLancy, the executive director of the Voter Integrity Project and a guest at the convention, said he witnessed delegates who were accidentally locked out of the hall successfully vote in the chairman election. Courtney Geels, a former Republican nominee for Congress, said that she learned of two people voting for chairman from Wisconsin and Wilmington. Geels declined to comment further.

Kane said the chairperson election had run into many technical difficulties that took time to resolve, resulting in a delay that ultimately led to no election being conducted for vice chair.

“The scene looked much more like that of an airport’s airline front desk when all of the flights have been canceled,” he said.

In his own submitted affidavit, Kane said state Rep. Ben Moss had cast his vote for Kane as a Richmond County delegate, despite election results showing that zero votes were cast for Kane from the county. Moss did not respond to a request for comment.

“If Michael was confident in the outcome, then you would think that he would want to have a process to investigate what happened and report back to all the delegates what occurred so that everyone can have confidence that he was in fact the duly elected chairman,” Kane said.