The Inside Man

Republican Sam Hayes says he doesn’t plan to take a hatchet to the State Board of Elections. In fact, he says he didn’t even seek out the job of executive director at the agency that Democrats had recently run.

Hayes had been general counsel to House Speaker Destin Hall when, he said, State Auditor Dave Boliek asked him to take over day-to-day operations of the elections agency, a political football that had just shifted to Republican control. “Dave is very persuasive,” Hayes said. (Boliek declined to comment.)

Hayes took over the role at a politically contentious moment, but he told The Assembly that his vision is simple: To faithfully implement the voting laws the General Assembly passes and the rules the board’s five voting members adopt. 

“I’m here to make sure that we have secure elections and that we have access for people that are entitled to vote,” Hayes said. “I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”

In his first few weeks on the job, he secured unanimous support from the board for a plan to update the registrations of roughly 194,000 voters.

But some of Hayes’ other moves aren’t alleviating concerns from Democrats and some voting rights groups that the board will politicize the election process and, ultimately, make it harder for some North Carolinians to cast a ballot. Among Hayes’ early moves was hiring Brian LiVecchi, a former top aide to Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, as his chief of staff, and asking the General Assembly to authorize more political appointees for key roles at the board. He said he wants Boliek to conduct a top-to-bottom audit of his agency. 

State Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton referred to the recent legal battle over the state Supreme Court race, in which Republicans sought to discard more than 66,000 ballots based on the claims they were counted in violation of various state laws. But Democratic Justice Allison Riggs retained her seat after a federal judge ruled in her favor.

“Republicans realized that they could not steal an election retroactively and that they had to do things that were going to enable their side to win before an election begins,” Clayton said. “That means looking at who controls those elections in our state, and it runs right through our state board.”

Burn Book

Karen Brinson Bell, Hayes’ predecessor, worked in local and state elections administration for more than a decade before becoming the NCSBE’s executive director in 2019. While Hayes has worked in state politics for the last 10 years, she said she worries about his lack of experience in election administration.

“I have been able to work with Sam and find him very knowledgeable about election law,” Brinson Bell said. “I do think it’s unfortunate that the board has taken the path to not have an election practitioner in the field.”

Hayes, who was born in Winston-Salem and grew up in Kernersville, points to his other relevant experience. He attended UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University School of Law before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1998 to work in commercial litigation at the law firm Arnold & Porter.

Hayes returned to North Carolina in 2015 and served as general counsel for the Department of Environment Quality for Gov. Pat McCrory. After McCrory lost his reelection in 2016, Hayes became State Treasurer Dale Folwell’s general counsel. That job ended with some lingering frustrations—though neither Hayes nor Folwell would explain what happened.

“As NC Treasurer, I always expected the best from people and wanted the best for them,” Folwell said in a statement. “I would never expect to offer him a job or have him accept it in the future. My experience is that the true advocates for secure and simple elections will not tolerate subpar answers or efforts just because someone is part of an insiders clique.”

Hayes said they’ve both moved on: “Sometimes personalities don’t mesh, and I’ll leave it at that.”

Making the Law

Hayes ran for state attorney general in 2020, finishing second in a three-way primary. He then went to work for House Speaker Tim Moore, a job that gave him a hand in passing some of the legislation he now is charged with enforcing. 

On election night, Riggs trailed Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin in the state Supreme Court race. But as more provisional ballots were counted, she pulled ahead by 734 votes. Both a machine recount and a partial hand-recount maintained her lead.

Republicans had long criticized the State Board of Elections and its Democratic leaders, accusing them of inappropriately extending mail-in ballot collection during the 2020 election, among other things. In the Riggs-Griffin race, they argued the board had incorrectly exempted military and overseas voters from the state’s photo ID law and insufficiently managed voter rolls.

In December, shortly before Republicans lost their supermajority in the state House, lawmakers passed a sweeping 132-page bill shifting election oversight from the governor to the state auditor. That put Boliek, a Republican, in charge of selecting both state elections board members and the executive director.

Hayes said he wasn’t responsible for the bill’s provision moving NCSBE appointment authority from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein to Boliek. But he said he was involved in a provision that reduced the provisional ballot collection window from nine days after the election to three—which, had it been in effect last year, would have almost assuredly lowered Riggs’ vote tally.

“We are getting so far beyond Election Day in the vote counting and in knowing the winner,” Hayes said. “At some point, it has to stop. And that’s what we were working toward.” (The House has since proposed increasing that ballot collection window to five days after an election.)

Hayes says the Riggs-Griffin battle revealed long-overdue changes needed at the NCSBE. So, too, did last year’s Hurricane Helene. While Hayes served as Moore’s interim chief of staff, he said he worked to include $5 million in a hurricane relief package for the NCSBE to bolster voting access—which was more than double what the agency requested.

Hayes said he heard complaints from people in Western N.C. about difficulty getting to certain voting sites because of limited parking. A bill passed last October increasing the number of early voting sites passed nearly unanimously.

“That might have been the last straw as far as the elections board,” Hayes said of the voting-site challenges after the storm. 

As executive director, Hayes said he’d be highly deferential to state lawmakers.

“I come from the legislature, and one of my priorities is a better relationship with the General Assembly,” Hayes said. “I’ll do my job here. I’ll let them do their job there. Their job is to write the laws. Mine is to follow it.”

Voter Outreach

One of Hayes’ first moves as executive director stemmed from the Riggs-Griffin fight. Republicans had argued that 60,273 ballots shouldn’t count because the voter registration appeared to be missing information required by federal law. 

After Griffin lost that protest in state and federal court, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit arguing that the NCSBE was violating federal law. Republican lawmakers and the new conservative majority on the board agreed that many of those North Carolinians should have to provide the missing information to continue voting. 

Last month, Hayes presented a plan to resolve the lawsuit that could result in tens of thousands of North Carolinians having to cast provisional ballots in future races if they don’t update their voter registration with a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. 

Democrats and Republicans on the NCSBE unanimously signed off on the plan last month and elections officials will begin reaching out to voters this month.

But some voting advocacy organizations worry that such actions could result in longtime voters not having their ballots counted in the 2026 midterms and beyond. The Democratic National Committee, North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans, NC NAACP, and League of Women Voters are among those challenging Hayes’ plan in court.

And Hayes has drawn attention to himself in other ways. In addition to hiring a former Robinson aide, he asked the General Assembly to provide funding for seven new political appointees to serve in key roles at the NCSBE and for private attorneys to defend the agency from lawsuits, rather than the Justice Department.

Both the House and Senate budgets include most of what Hayes asked for, though a final budget is still under negotiation. 

Some House Republicans have called for giving Hayes even more latitude than he requested. An elections omnibus bill that cleared its first committee last month would allow Hayes to assign up to 25 NCSBE positions to political appointees. 

Democratic Rep. Phil Rubin of Wake County unsuccessfully offered an amendment to remove that provision. “This will shake faith in elections,” Rubin said during a committee hearing.

Hayes said that he wants to put appointees in senior positions at the NCSBE but that he hasn’t called for firing any current employees. 

“We haven’t made any determination,” Hayes said. “What we’re doing is looking at the agency functions from top to bottom, looking for efficiencies of where we might be able to realign to do the job better.” 

Hayes also distanced himself from other controversial parts of the bill, including a proposed ban on state and county elections officials “promoting voter turnout in any election” and a provision that would let foreign nationals donate to ballot measures, such as the Charlotte transit plan expected to head to voters this year. Hall has said the bill is likely to change. The NCSBE didn’t request those provisions, Hayes said. 

“I am a Republican, but I know what role I’m in now, and that’s the chief elections officer,” Hayes said. “I serve all the people of this state without regard to party. I’m not here working from the inside to game anything.”

Bryan Anderson is a freelance reporter who most recently covered elections, voting access, and state government for WRAL-TV. He previously reported for the Associated Press and The News & Observer. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.