Thread by @Robyn_NSanders

For the first time in 125 years, elections in NC will no longer be overseen by a governor elected by the people, but by partisan operatives handpicked by a Republican state auditor, thanks to an anonymous, unexplained, two-sentence court order. 🧵

The new Republican-controlled board will now oversee every election in all 100 counties—including a still-disputed Supreme Court race that @AllisonJRiggs won, where GOP judges ordered thousands of ballots be discarded. The timing is not a coincidence. It’s a setup.

Let’s be clear: the people of North Carolina voted against this power grab—repeatedly. Courts had already ruled it unconstitutional. But Republicans waited for a lame-duck window, rammed it through, and found partisan judges willing to rubber-stamp it in secret.

Republicans played a shell game to do this. When courts ruled that taking elections oversight from the governor violated the separation of powers, they simply swapped out the defendant. Instead of giving control to the legislature directly, they handed it to the state auditor.

The state auditor is a Republican who just so happens to be in the executive branch. It’s a cynical workaround designed to pass constitutional muster on paper while gutting it in practice. The branch hasn’t changed. The motive hasn’t changed. Only the name. This isn’t governance.

This move is a bad-faith legal charade, and it insults every North Carolinian who believes elections should be decided by voters—not by partisan lawyers playing musical chairs with our democracy.

And Boliek? He could have declined to participate in this sham. He could have refused to wield power obtained through a rushed, opaque, and legally dubious ruling. But instead, he rushed to name partisan appointees before even filling the legally required Democratic seats.

Boliek is not a neutral actor. He’s a willing participant in the erosion of democratic norms. And where is the North Carolina Supreme Court in all this? Silent. The governor asked them to intervene to pause this power grab before it took effect. They have not yet acted at all.

This is how democracy dies in real time: not with tanks in the street, but with courts that do nothing, officials who know better and stay quiet, and power handed to those who will never give it back. North Carolina is not the exception. It’s the test case.