Challenges to 2026 Midterm Election Administration in North Carolina

Leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, President Donald Trump has been trying to settle old scores and tip the scales in future races. These efforts have relied, at least in part, on claims about noncitizen voting and debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Across the country, election administration is being reshaped in ways that give election deniers more control over how elections are run. Officials aligned with Trump’s election agenda now have more power over voting rules, voter rolls, early voting, ballot handling, investigations, and certification. These officials are using their control over election offices and records to restrict voting, disrupt election administration, sow doubt about valid election results, and open the door even wider to federal intervention in state and local elections — at times in direct coordination with the Trump administration and the state Republican Party.

The mechanics differ by state. Below, we lay out our biggest concerns about North Carolina, and what we are doing to fight back.

This is part of a series. Read more about our investigations in Arizona and Georgia. 

What’s been happening

North Carolina state lawmakers have installed partisan actors in key election administration roles and advanced rules that change how voting works in the state. This has led to new election rules designed to make it harder for many North Carolinians to cast their ballots and make sure they are counted.

Control over elections has become partisan

In November 2024, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority stripped the Democratic governor’s authority to appoint a majority of the members of the State Board of Elections (NCSBE) — the body responsible for overseeing the state’s elections — and transferred that power to the state’s Republican auditor, Dave Boliek. The state legislature overrode the governor’s veto to pass the law. North Carolina is the only state in the country where the auditor holds this power over election administration processes.

As a result of the legislature’s maneuver, NCSBE and all of the state’s 100 county election boards are under Republican control.

NCSBE, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature, and several county election boards have used their authority to change election rules to make it harder for many North Carolinians to vote. These changes include restricting mail-in ballots and early voting, passing more stringent voter ID laws, and expanding voter eligibility challenges. 

In July 2026, NCSBE approved a rule that would make it easier for election officials to toss out North Carolinians’ mail-in ballots by requiring voters to explain any “irregularities” in writing before their votes are counted. This is a major change from previous elections, when “irregular” ballots — such as those returned in an unsealed envelope, mailed with other ballots in the same envelope, or signed in the wrong place — were accepted without requiring voters to confirm their intention to vote.

The state auditor’s office appears to have tried to restrict voting 

In September 2025, State Auditor Boliek hired Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of North Carolina’s Republican Party, into a newly-created position as a liaison to oversee county election boards. Over the summer of 2026, Woodhouse’s communications with multiple  Republican county board members and staff surfaced, suggesting he — and possibly other staff from the auditor’s office — pressured election officials ahead of the midterm elections. Woodhouse pushed to eliminate Sunday voting hours, which are popular among Black voters, and to change early voting sites from locations at college campuses and town centers to more rural sites favored by Republicans. Records we obtained suggest that these requests went far beyond the auditor’s office’s proper role, and instead reflected the partisan priorities of Boliek and the state Republican Party. 

In a late May 2026 group text, Woodhouse wrote to Larue Ulshafer, then chair of the Granville County Board of Elections, promising that staff from the auditor’s office would help “shove our new Granville early voting plan down their throats,” and offered to “tell the Democrats where to go stick it.”  

This was not an isolated incident. The morning before the Jackson County Board of Elections was scheduled to choose early voting locations in June 2026, Woodhouse texted the board’s chair, “Don’t let them have a vote.” The month prior, texts show Woodhouse told the chair of the Columbus County board that five early voting sites were “overkill,” and three sites would be “plenty” for its roughly 37,000 registered voters. Records we obtained from Lee County reference a text conversation in which Woodhouse advised election officials on reducing Sunday early voting hours. Woodhouse also reportedly told the chair of the Pasquotank County board to “drop Sunday” voting hours.  

Woodhouse resigned in July 2026 after those conversations became public. However, Boliek has remained in his auditor role, where he has authority to appoint members of NCSBE and county election boards, and to designate every county board’s chair.

Election deniers have been pushing for voter roll purge tools 

Partisan activists and election deniers — including groups like the North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT), which lobbies for restrictive voting laws — have reportedly met with elected officials in North Carolina to promote voter roll purge tools like EagleAI in recent years. 

In February 2026, we released records that show election officials in North Carolina agreed to view a demonstration of the voter purge tool ELLY after it was promoted by individuals affiliated with election denial activists and networks. Records also show that members of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network (EIN), an election denial activism group, were “beta-testing” ELLY in early 2026.

Tools like ELLY, Psephos, and EagleAI — which were developed and promoted by individuals affiliated with election denial activists and networks — rely on outdated or mismatched datasets, including public records that are not designed to determine voter eligibility. Experts say this can produce “huge numbers of false positives,” which increases the likelihood that eligible voters could be wrongly flagged and removed from the voter rolls altogether.

These tools were created by election denial activists to root out alleged noncitizens on states’ voter registration lists, even though there is no evidence that noncitizens are voting at levels that would impact election results anywhere in the U.S. An audit of the 2016 election in North Carolina found only 41 noncitizen voters, who were all legally in the United States and erroneously told that they could register.

State law also currently permits any registered voter in North Carolina to challenge the eligibility of another voter in the same county, with some protections to prevent disenfranchisement.

State officials are coordinating with federal officials seeking voter data

North Carolina has already worked with the Department of Justice (DOJ) on a settlement involving voter-registration records. Roughly 100,000 North Carolinians will be forced to hand over their drivers license or partial social security numbers to participate in the 2026 election, as part of a program NCSBE set up to settle lawsuits the Republican National Committee, the North Carolina Republican Party, and the DOJ filed against the board after the 2024 election.

Those lawsuits challenged the registrations of over 220,000 voters whose state voter registration information did not include their driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. The voters whose registrations were challenged will not be able to participate in state elections until they share the additional information. They could submit a provisional ballot to participate in the 2026 election, but those ballots also require voters’ drivers license and/or partial social security numbers.

In addition, NCSBE voted to send North Carolina’s entire voter list to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comparison with its SAVE database, which was historically used to check whether immigrants are entitled to government benefits. The Trump administration has expanded SAVE use to monitor voter rolls, but it is based on unreliable data and has already resulted in eligible voters being removed from other states’ voter rolls.

Why this matters

This November, North Carolina will elect new political leaders for its top posts — including 170 seats in the state’s legislature, one on its Supreme Court, 14 in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a U.S. senator position. 

The changes North Carolina has made to its election laws could make it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots and make sure they’re counted, with voters of color, people with less access to wealth, and older and disabled Americans at heightened risk of disenfranchisement. Many of those groups tend to vote for Democrats, rather than the Republicans who currently control the state’s election boards. This disenfranchisement is even more pronounced given recent redistricting in the state, which has turned North Carolina’s districts into some of the most gerrymandered in the country. 

Given how narrow Republican control is in Congress, the results of North Carolina’s elections could have a major national impact — including shifting control of the U.S. Senate. The state’s changes to election processes will also have national impacts, especially considering recent similar actions in other states: In Georgia, partisan actors have expanded or shifted powers that were historically held by governors and nonpartisan election officials. In Arizona, election deniers who have been placed in positions of authority at the county level have reduced early voting locations or ballot drop boxes, tightened signature-review rules, and made it more difficult to fix mail-in ballot problems.

What we’re doing about it

American Oversight has been using public records requests and litigation to investigate these efforts to suppress certain voters’ eligibility in North Carolina, and has demanded transparency about state officials’ last-minute rule changes ahead of the 2026 election. Our work has already uncovered some North Carolina election officials’ efforts to sway early voting decisions and interactions with prominent election deniers who rejected the 2020 results.

Investigating ulterior motives for election changes

In August and October 2026, we published text messages that show that officials from the state auditor’s office tried to influence county election board decisions on early voting plans. The texts show the Office of the State Auditor’s (OSA) elections liaison, Dallas Woodhouse,  communicating with county election officials in an effort to influence their decisions about early voting plans, at times using hostile partisan language. The messages add to concerns about the OSA’s coordination with North Carolina Republican Party officials — and raise questions about the extent of Auditor Boliek’s involvement.

We’ve filed multiple public records requests for Woodhouse’s and other OSA officials’ communications with county election board members, and for any training materials the office gave those boards. OSA failed to meet its legal obligation to respond to those requests, so we took action to demand answers. Initially, OSA’s general counsel told us Auditor Boliek had no text messages responsive to our requests. That turned out not to be the case. Through our ongoing demands for transparency from the OSA, we obtained not only texts between Boliek and Woodhouse, but an admission that Woodhouse deleted texts responsive to our requests. 

In August 2026, OSA produced about 100 pages of Woodhouse’s communications, but admitted “not all of Woodhouse’s texts were successfully backed up” for retrieval. Some screenshots of messages initially appeared to be cropped in ways that obscure key information, but we continued to push OSA until we received full versions. We’re continuing to fight for the release of the full unrecovered messages, as well as texts from other OSA officials.

Exposing the election denial activists behind voter suppression efforts 

We’ve also obtained communications that shed light on election denial activists’ involvement in recent voter suppression efforts in North Carolina. In addition to the NCSBE’s role in sending North Carolina’s voter list to DHS to review using SAVE, records show that other state officials have also advocated for the use of problematic voter roll purge tools.

Other records we’ve published shed light on election denial activists’ yearslong efforts to challenge voter registrations in North Carolina. Emails show that EIN’s founder Cleta Mitchell — who was active in attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and tried to sow doubt in election processes ahead of the 2024 vote — was also involved in efforts to pass strict voting rules in North Carolina and other states ahead of the 2026 election. In March 2025, a North Carolina-based election denial activist included Mitchell in an email expressing support of a bill that would ban mail-in voting nationally. Mitchell responded, “There are some fixes needed for this bill but it is a big step.”

Additionally, we’ve been investigating the Trump administration’s expansion of DHS’s SAVE database, and we’ve uncovered records that show the administration incorporated all Americans’ driver’s license and Social Security data into SAVE. Experts warn that could facilitate more voter roll purges, fuel election integrity misinformation and disinformation, and dramatically escalate the federal government’s access to Americans’ sensitive personal data.