We Need To Talk About The Carolina Coup.

What can we do about it?

Image from Democracy NC

I spent time in North Carolina over the last few days. This involved getting to know the organizers, activists, and legislators who are staring down the most sophisticated election infrastructure seizure in any American state. What I found there is not a North Carolina story. It is the story of how one party consolidates power when it controls both the legislature and the courts, and it is the story of what the rest of us do when the institution designed to protect fair play has been captured by one of the players.

Imagine a basketball game where one team commits a flagrant foul. The other team appeals to the referee. The referee waits. He stands at half court, whistle in his mouth, watching the offending team score again, and again, and again. After the lead is out of reach, he finally blows the whistle and says: “Well, the score has changed too much to reverse it now. Play on.”

Then imagine you look at his jersey and realize he is wearing the other team’s colors.

That metaphor maps precisely onto what happened in North Carolina between April and May of 2025, and if you think it cannot happen where you live, you have not been paying attention to how the opposition operates.

In November 2024, weeks after North Carolina voters elected Democrats to every major statewide office, the Republican legislature passed Senate Bill 382. The bill started as six pages about dental practice reforms. By the time it reached the floor, it had grown to 132 pages and been renamed Hurricane Helene disaster relief.¹ The relief money, $227 million, ended on page thirteen. The remaining 119 pages, buried alongside $500 million in private school vouchers and additional disaster spending, stripped powers from the incoming Democratic governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction and handed them to Republicans.¹ The largest single prize was elections. For more than 125 years, North Carolina’s governor had appointed the five members of the State Board of Elections. SB 382 transferred that authority to State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican whose actual job is auditing the state’s finances.¹ Auditors count money. No state in the country gives its auditor control over elections. But Boliek belonged to the right party, and the voters had just elected the wrong governor. This was the sixth time in eight years the legislature had tried to strip a Democratic governor of election board control.¹ Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, calling it “a sham.”¹ The legislature overrode him within weeks.

On April 23, 2025, a three-judge panel in Wake County Superior Court ruled 2-1 that the election board transfer violated the state constitution.¹ Two of the three, one Republican and one Democrat, found the law unconstitutional “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Republican dissenter’s argument, taken to its logical end, would let a hostile legislature strip the governor of every function one piece at a time, parking each one with whichever officer happens to belong to the right party. The governor’s office becomes ceremonial.

Seven days later, an anonymous three-judge panel on the Court of Appeals blocked that ruling in two sentences.² No oral argument. No briefing. No legal reasoning. No names attached to the decision. When the court finally revealed the judges’ identities ninety days later, all three turned out to be Republicans on a bench where Republicans outnumber Democrats twelve to three.³

The next morning, Boliek made his appointments. The board flipped overnight from a 3-2 Democratic majority to 3-2 Republican.⁴ Within a week, the new majority fired Karen Brinson Bell, a nationally respected executive director who had run the state’s elections through a hurricane and a pandemic, and replaced her with Sam Hayes, the top lawyer for Republican House Speaker Destin Hall.⁵ David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called the move a “highly partisan power grab” that cost the country “one of the most highly respected election officials in the country.”⁵

Governor Stein asked the state Supreme Court to intervene the same day, April 30. The court received his emergency motion. Then it did nothing.

Not for a day. Not for a week. For almost a month, five Republican justices sat on the governor’s request while Boliek’s appointees dismantled the state’s election infrastructure.⁴ The new board hired partisan operatives. The legislature created seven new political appointee positions exempt from civil service protections.⁶ The board’s general counsel resigned, citing the agency’s leadership changes; a departing staff member told Carolina Public Press the office had shifted “from a nonpartisan shop to a partisan shop.”⁷

When the Supreme Court finally ruled on May 23, Republican Justice Richard Dietz said what the delay had already proved: “The status quo has changed. It would create quite a mess to try to unring that bell through our own extraordinary writ.”⁴

The court received an emergency request. It waited while the emergency played out. Then it pointed to the damage caused by its own silence and called that damage the reason it could not act. The mess belongs to the legislature that passed an unconstitutional statute, not to the governor and the voters it was designed to disenfranchise. A court that refuses to reverse a constitutional violation because reversal would be disruptive has announced that any violation succeeds as long as the violator moves fast enough.

The ref blew the whistle after the game was over. Then he shrugged.

Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats on the bench, accused her five Republican colleagues of “a disingenuous act of double-speak, also known as gaslighting.”⁸ Justice Allison Riggs called the decision a threat to the integrity of the judicial branch.⁹ Both saw the delay for what it was: the act itself.

The consequences arrived quickly. All one hundred county election boards flipped to Republican control, with Boliek appointing GOP chairs across the state.¹⁰ The board brought on staff with deep ties to Republican politics, including a former aide to the lawmaker who led the state’s most recent congressional gerrymander.⁷ The legislature gave the board $1.5 million to hire private attorneys, replacing the state’s nonpartisan lawyers.⁶ Then came the maps. In October 2025, Republican lawmakers redrew North Carolina’s congressional districts for the third time this decade, targeting an 11-3 GOP delegation with an efficiency gap of R+26, one of the most aggressive gerrymanders in the country.¹¹˙¹²˙¹³

The legislature and the courts form a closed loop, and the gerrymander is the engine that keeps it spinning. SB 382 also requires the governor to fill court vacancies with a member of the departing judge’s party, locking in the Republican Supreme Court majority no matter who voters elect as governor.

So what do we do when the ref is wearing their jersey?

The temptation is to go nuclear. Stein could declare, based on the trial court’s ruling, that he remains the lawful appointing authority and simply act on that declaration. The legal argument is not frivolous: the only court that examined SB 382’s election board provisions on the merits found them unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court never ruled that the trial court was wrong. It refused to reverse the damage because it would “create quite a mess.”⁴ Under that reasoning, any constitutional violation becomes permanent the moment someone implements it fast enough.

The problem with defiance now is not that it is wrong. The problem is mechanical. Boliek’s appointees already sit in the offices, control the staff, hold the voter rolls, and manage the IT systems. If Stein appoints a parallel board, those appointees have no building to walk into. A board is not a piece of paper. It is an office full of people and servers and contracts, and the other side already has the keys.

The window for defiance that would have actually worked opened the day the legislature overrode Cooper’s veto. At that point the governor still held the board, still controlled the staff, still had the keys to the building. Cooper or Stein could have said: this is the sixth attempt in eight years, it was stuffed into a fake hurricane relief bill, and I am not implementing it. If the legislature believes this law is constitutional, they can take me to court and prove it. Someone kicks in your front door, you do not call a judge and ask permission to lock the bedroom. You lock it. If they want in, they can go get a court order. Instead, our side complied, the machinery changed hands voluntarily, and then we asked the courts to give it back. In a functioning democracy, that would have been the right call. You follow the process, the courts review the law, and the system corrects itself. But Republicans have spent decades making sure the system does not correct itself.

They gerrymandered the legislature, used the gerrymandered legislature to stack the courts, and used the stacked courts to protect the gerrymander.

Compliance in the face of openly and corruptly partisan courts does not preserve democratic norms. It facilitates authoritarian consolidation. Every time we follow the old rules while the other side rewrites them, we make the next theft easier. The trial court ruling four months later confirmed what was obvious on day one. We did not need it to act. We needed it because we chose not to act without it.

There is a broader lesson here for every Democrat who holds power anywhere in this country: cede ground nowhere, ever, without a fight. Do not hand over the keys and hope the courts will sort it out. Make them fight for every inch. The courts in North Carolina did not sort it out. They ran out the clock. The lesson is that the next time a legislature steals executive authority, the governor holds that ground and forces the legislature to prove the theft was legal. Not the other way around.

The approach that actually fits the moment is aggressive anti-corruption enforcement. The speed and precision of the takeover raises questions any prosecutor would recognize. Did anyone promise a job or a contract in exchange for political support? Did the officials who made those decisions disclose their financial relationships as Chapter 138A requires? Did any public officer benefit personally from a contract they helped direct, which is a crime under G.S. 14-234? Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind of questions that compelled examinations under oath are designed to answer.

Attorney General Jeff Jackson has the authority to ask them. Under G.S. 75-10 and G.S. 75D-6, the attorney general can compel any person to submit to examination under oath, produce every document in their possession, administer oaths personally, and send bills of indictment before any grand jury in any county where a violation occurred. Refuse, and a court orders compliance. Disobey, and it is contempt. Lie, and it is perjury. Jackson controls the State Bureau of Investigation and has common law authority, affirmed by the state Supreme Court itself, to prosecute all actions necessary for the protection of the property and revenue of the people of North Carolina. Governor Stein can direct the SBI to open criminal investigations into matters of major importance under G.S. 114-12. The conduct speaks for itself. Put the decision-makers under oath and make sure everything was above board.

Convictions remove people from office. They do not wait for the next election. A grand jury does not care how the legislative districts were drawn.

We still need to win elections. Earls’ statewide Supreme Court race matters because the gerrymander cannot touch a popular vote.¹⁴ Holding the House supermajority break matters. Flipping one Senate seat to give Stein’s veto full force matters.¹⁵ But if elections are the whole plan, then we are telling Republicans: you broke the rules, you stole the seats, and now we need years to work our way back through a system you rigged while you enjoy every day of what you took. They use every tool at their disposal to take our freedom and destroy our democracy. We need to be just as ruthless restoring it. The investigations are how we find out whether crimes were committed, and if they were, the people who committed them go to jail and lose their seats now, not after we spend half a decade clawing back ground they never should have taken. The elections finish the job.

The people who rigged the system bet that we would follow the old rules while they wrote new ones. They bet on patience, politeness, and deference to institutions that have already been stolen. They bet that the governor would file a lawsuit, issue a statement, and wait.

The ref is wearing their jersey. We can see it. Everyone can see it. So we stop pretending the officiating is neutral, we play harder than we have ever played, and we put criminals in jail. If we were polite 250 years ago we would still be part of England.

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Works Cited

1. Three-judge panel rules for Gov. Stein in legal battle over elections board appointments. (2025, April 23). *Carolina Journal*. https://www.carolinajournal.com/three-judge-panel-rules-for-gov-stein-in-legal-battle-over-elections-board-appointments/

2. Court of Appeals clears path for Republicans to take over NC Board of Elections. Stein to appeal. (2025, April 30). *WRAL*. https://www.wral.com/story/court-of-appeals-clears-path-for-republicans-to-take-over-nc-board-of-elections-stein-to-appeal/21985940/

3. All-GOP Appeals Court panel ruled against Stein in elections board dispute. (2025, July 29). *Carolina Journal*. https://www.carolinajournal.com/all-gop-appeals-court-panel-ruled-against-stein-in-elections-board-dispute/

4. North Carolina’s high court says elections board shift can continue while appeals carry on. (2025, May 25). *WUNC*. https://www.wunc.org/politics/2025-05-25/north-carolina-supreme-court-elections-board-shift

5. North Carolina’s election director is ousted after a Republican power play. (2025, May 7). *WUNC*. https://www.wunc.org/politics/2025-05-07/election-director-north-carolina-ousted-republican-power-play

6. Schofield, R. (2025, May 21). GOP continues its transformation of the Board of Elections into a partisan tool. *NC Newsline*. https://ncnewsline.com/2025/05/21/gop-continues-its-transformation-of-the-board-of-elections-into-a-partisan-tool/

7. North Carolina adds more partisan GOP staffers to election board. (2025, November 8). *Democracy Docket*. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/north-carolina-adds-more-partisan-gop-staffers-to-election-board/

8. Foregone conclusion. Legal struggle over NC elections appointment power essentially ends with court ruling. (2025, May 28). *Carolina Public Press*. https://carolinapublicpress.org/71001/power-appoint-nc-elections-officials-stays-auditor-supreme-ruling/

9. Lam, J. (2025, May 8). North Carolina Court enables a partisan shift on state elections board. *State Court Report*, Brennan Center for Justice. https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/north-carolina-court-enables-partisan-shift-state-elections-board

10. NC county elections boards shift from Democratic to GOP control. (2025, June 25). *NC Newsline*. https://ncnewsline.com/briefs/nc-county-elections-boards-shift-from-democratic-to-gop-control/

11. North Carolina Republicans pass new congressional maps aimed at creating 11-3 majority. (2025, October 22). *The Daily Tar Heel*. https://dailytarheel.com/article/city-ncga-republicans-redrawing-congressional-maps-20251023

12. North Carolina can use GOP-drawn congressional map designed to add another Republican House seat, court rules. (2025, November 27). *NBC News*. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/federal-court-allows-north-carolina-use-new-republican-drawn-map-2026-rcna246156

13. A detailed analysis of North Carolina’s new congressional map. (2025). *Inside Elections*. https://insideelections.com/news/article/a-detailed-analysis-of-north-carolinas-new-congressional-map

14. Field is set for NC 2026 elections as filing closes. (2025, December 19). *WUNC*. https://www.wunc.org/term/news/2025-12-19/field-set-nc-2026-elections

15. Democrats break Republican supermajority in North Carolina General Assembly. (2024, November 6). *WRAL*. https://www.wral.com/story/democrats-break-republican-supermajority-in-north-carolina-general-assembly/21705790/