South North Carolina News

North Carolina State House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) applauded a federal judge’s order that criticized state Attorney General Josh Stein for trying to change election laws without authority.

“This order by U.S. District Court Judge Osteen exposes Attorney General Josh Stein’s ‘consent decree’ for the purely partisan sham that it is,” Moore said in a September release on his website.

Moore previously alleged that the state Department of Justice released false materials about its “sue-and-settle” deal on voting. In the settlement, the state agreed that mail-in absentee ballots with incomplete information can be fixed instead of requiring the voter to fill out an entirely new ballot, the Associated Press reported in September.

Osteen's order confirms that a “Fact Sheet” and “Summary of Consent Decree” released by the DOJ contained false statements, Moore said.

The State Board of Elections has “re-written the one-witness requirement, a statute this court previously upheld, to permit [the] submission of an absentee ballot without a witness," Osteen wrote, the Raleigh News and Observer reported in September. 

That “undermines and in effect eliminates the legislature’s interest in preventing ballot fraud,” the judge said, the Raleigh News & Observer reported.