Newby ballot challenges in race for chief justice show outsize impact on Black voters
Paul Newby has challenged thousands of mail-in ballots across North Carolina in the tight race for state Supreme Court chief justice.
But a disproportionate number of those protests have been filed against Black voters, an analysis by The News & Observer has found.
Newby, a Republican who currently holds a seat on the high court, leads Democratic opponent and sitting Chief Justice Cheri Beasley by fewer than 500 votes in the unofficial results. That close margin and an ongoing recount kept the State Board of Elections from certifying the race.
That recount resumes Monday. But state election officials must also rule on the dueling challenges filed by each campaign over ballots cast in the contest.
For the Beasley campaign, the aim was to add votes from ballots it says were improperly rejected by election officials. That strategy has drawn criticism from Republicans following an N&O report that the Democrat largely excluded GOP voters from its list of more than 3,000 names.
Newby’s protests, on the other hand, seek “to disqualify and remove from the final vote count the votes that should not have counted.”
“Doing so will mean the election truly complied with the North Carolina General Statutes instead of blatantly and unlawfully ignoring them,“ one of the campaign’s protest appeals reads.
Unlike Beasley’s list, Newby’s protests include the names of hundreds of Republican voters. But the N&O’s analysis shows that the Newby campaign challenged the ballots of Black voters at nearly three times the rate of white voters, a disparity that largely persists regardless of party.
In an interview with the N&O, Newby campaign spokesperson Tim Wigginton said their efforts to identify problematic ballots didn’t take race or party into account and was entirely based on public records provided by county election boards.
“Our intention isn’t to target any one group or anything like that,” Wigginton said. “Our intention is to make sure that the law is being followed and to make sure that the [election] boards are properly doing their jobs, too.”
Wigginton pointed out that the records used by the Newby campaign — scans of absentee ballot envelopes filled out by voters — include neither race nor party.
Although the cause of the outsize impact on Black voters may be unclear, the disparity is “nonrandom and unignorable,” says Chris Cooper, a professor of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University who reviewed the N&O’s findings.
“We expect partisans to act like partisans. We don’t expect partisans to target people of certain races more than others and to challenge the votes of people of certain races more than others,” Cooper said. “I do think that is a difference that is worth noting.”
GOP volunteers checked envelopes
To generate its challenge lists, the Newby campaign relied on volunteers from the N.C. Republican Party. Those volunteers originally reviewed envelopes from accepted mail-in ballots from 15 counties that responded to records requests sent weeks before the November election.
From there, Wigginton said, the team narrowed the challenges to eight counties with what they felt were “significant discrepancies.”
“We have limited manpower, we have limited time and resources, especially during the height of the election, so we found some data discrepancies upon reviewing them and we dived deeper into it,” Wigginton said.
Following instructions provided by the party, volunteers took down the names and addresses of voters with at least one of a list of possible “irregularities,” like the lack of a voter or witness signature.
Wigginton said volunteers weren’t instructed to use registration information or any other outside data to collect the names.
“We don’t know the race of the person on the envelope. We’re not using data, we’re not using modeling,” Wigginton said. “We’re not doing any of that stuff.”
The resulting data in the challenges submitted to state and county election boards is messy — it contains duplicates, misspellings and blanks. But the N&O was able to match about 3,400 names across the eight counties represented in the challenges, which include Wake, Durham and Mecklenburg.
Black voters make up about 32% of that list, despite casting only about 16% of the mail-in ballots accepted in those counties.
As a proportion of the total ballots accepted, the number of protests overall is relatively small. But the Newby campaign challenged the ballots of Black voters at about 2.7 times the rate of white voters, the N&O’s analysis shows.
And the disparity is not a function of party.
Both Black Democratic and Black unaffiliated voters had their ballots challenged at more than twice the rate of their white peers (that’s true of Black Republicans too, although their numbers are too small to be significant). White Democrats, by contrast, had their ballots challenged at a slightly lower rate than white Republicans, the analysis shows.
Wigginton said the Newby campaign was unaware of the racial disparities before the N&O shared its findings with them.
“I don’t know why there’s going to be a disparity, I just know that what we’re protesting is something that should have already been caught by the county board,” he said. “That’s the tension right there.”
He noted that outside the challenge process, white and Black voters already see disparities. State election data, in fact, show that Black voters statewide have had their ballots rejected for this election at more than three times the rate of white voters.
But that doesn’t explain why Black voters are also bearing the brunt of the campaign’s challenges once they’re accepted.
Wigginton said the campaign used “a transparent process to make sure every legal ballot’s being counted,” and pointed to the inclusion of nearly 500 Republicans on the challenge list as proof the campaign stuck to a uniform legal standard in its review.
“If it was not evenly applied, that would have been the first thing I would have done is not protest any Republican ballots, if we were trying to put our thumbs on the scale as a political party,” Wigginton said. “You wouldn’t want to accidentally protest your own ballots.”
Campaign challenging minor ballot errors
Bill Busa, founder and president of EQV Analytics, a campaign data analytics firm that works with Democratic candidates, said the disparities are too large to be “just a statistical fluke.” Busa, who is not involved with the Beasley campaign, highlighted similar racial disparities in Newby’s challenges in Durham County on Twitter a few weeks after the election.
The use of race in an election strategy, he said, is “detestable.” And he said the Newby campaign’s protests have the potential to do real damage to a community with a well documented history of voter suppression.
“One of the reasons why we have such difficulty getting, particularly, young Black voters to turn out and vote is because so many of them have the feeling that their vote doesn’t matter and the system is stacked against them,” Busa said. “And the damned thing is, with the second of those two points, they’re right: this system is stacked against them.”
Wigginton denies that racial bias — explicit or implicit — is at play here. The legal guidelines are clear, he said, and the campaign’s instructions were aimed at standardizing the process as much as possible. He said any ballots that didn’t meet the criteria were flagged for protest.
“I’d be curious to see if someone had a better idea how to do that, but I don’t really see one,” Wigginton said.
To Busa, the problem lies in the underlying goal of the protests themselves. He pointed out that many of the issues flagged by GOP volunteers are minor ones, like witness addresses missing a city name.
“The goal of an election worker is to fairly enable fallible human beings to vote. You can’t hold [voters] to a standard of perfection, because if you do, you’re going to disenfranchise a lot of people for no good reason,” Busa said. “But if you’re an attorney trying to tip an election, you’re going to do exactly the opposite.”
In a statement, Beasley campaign manager Benjamin Woods did not address the disparities detailed in the N&O’s findings directly, but stressed that the election process “is not complete until every eligible vote is accounted for.”
“The people of North Carolina deserve to have their votes counted and their voices heard, regardless of race or creed, and the Chief Justice will continue to advocate for accountability and fairness until that goal is accomplished,” Woods said.
While both candidates are challenging thousands of votes, Cooper said the two sides are pursuing significantly different strategies.
For Beasley’s protests, he said, it’s largely politics as usual. But even if it’s nakedly partisan, he said the argument to count improperly rejected votes is an “easier pill to swallow.”
“Beasley’s protests are more consistent with the fight for voting rights that has existed in this country for over 100 years,” Cooper said. “And these Newby protests, particularly given that they are trying to throw out a disproportionate number of African-American votes, work against the grain of voting rights.”
Campaigns don’t have much incentive to correct these disparities, Cooper said, even if they’re unintentional. Protests like these are data-intensive and happen quickly without much in-depth scrutiny.
And campaigns, after all, are designed to win elections, not to act responsibly.
“I think we need to have structures in place to make sure that we don’t favor the voice of one group as opposed to the other,” Cooper said. “The grand irony of it all: the group we depend on to do that, of course, is the North Carolina Supreme Court.”
This story was originally published November 28, 2020 at 10:36 AM with the headline "Newby ballot challenges in race for chief justice show outsize impact on Black voters."