RALEIGH – The N.C. State Board of Elections voted 5-0 Tuesday to confirm Damon Circosta as the new chairman as key decisions on voting machine requirements loom. Governor Roy Cooper appointed Circosta, who previously served on the Board as an unaffiliated member before the Board’s construct was changed by court order, after former chairman Bob Cordle (D) suddenly resigned after telling a crude joke to a large group of N.C. election officials.

“We have a lot of work to do over the next couple of years to ensure North Carolina voters are confident that our elections are secure,” Circosta said in a news release. “I look forward to working with our partners at the state and county levels to conduct successful elections in 2019, 2020 and beyond.”

As the lone unaffiliated member on the previous Board, Circosta was supposed to be a tie-breaking vote on stalemates between the Republican and Democrat members. Yet, unaffiliated hardly equates to being independent, or without political leanings. Do you think Roy Cooper would select someone he didn’t feel confident would always break ties in favor of Democrats?

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Now, under the new Board’s construct (a reversion to the structure before Republican reforms to make the Board more bipartisan), in which no unaffiliated voters can serve, Circosta had to register, naturally, as a Democrat.

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Which makes sense; Circosta served as executive director of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh since 2012. (He is also a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and also formerly led the North Carolina Center for Voter Education.)

The Foundation is a fixture in a web of liberal non-profits that predictably push a rather liberal agenda. Serving as president of the Foundation is one Barbara Goodmon, wife of Jim Goodmon, the Owner/CEO of Capitol Broadcasting Company (CBC), who also serves as chairman of the Foundation.

CBC owns WRAL-TV, radio stations, real estate and even the Durham Bulls. It was founded by one A.J. Fletcher — Goodmon’s grandfather — for which the Foundation is named. WRAL commonly features ‘Official Opinion of CBC’ editorials that frequently display all the hallmarks of the Far Left, like comparing N.C. Republican legislative leaders to Communist Dictator Kim Jong Un and Trump supporters to a Cult.

That is the pool from which Cooper selected a new chairman, which can be expected, but does not necessarily promote a sense of bipartisan/non-partisan approaches from a Board that has a lot on its plate.