NC elections spokesman on paid leave after internal debate over board's fiery statement condemning top Democrat
NCSBE spokesman Patrick Gannon remains an employee, but has been on paid leave since Monday. The move follows internal disagreement over how best to respond to false claims made by Democrats.
The final day of in-person early voting for the November municipal elections wasn’t the ideal time for the state’s Voter Search tool to fail.
North Carolinians in 94 of the state’s 100 counties on Saturday couldn’t determine whether they were registered to vote and locate their nearest voting site.
The outage prompted calls into state Democratic Party hotlines. The NCDP then privately reached out to the State Board of Elections for clarity and publicly expressed concern in the waning minutes of early voting.
On X, the NCDP wrote that it received confirmation the online resource was down. The group then falsely claimed the outage was “impacting poll workers’ ability to quickly identify and register voters.”
Despite the party’s messaging, poll workers could still perform same-day registration and identify people in the voter database. In other words, while the public-facing lookup tool was down, the underlying data available to poll workers was unharmed.
But it may have been the Democratic Party’s next tweet that was the final straw for the NCSBE’s new top brass:
