Team Ticket, Paper Ballot Study Bills Pass House | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Barry Smith, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

If measures pass Senate, study committees would draft bills for next year's session

    RALEIGH     Two measures that could affect future North Carolina elections appear headed for further study.

    One would have changed the N.C. Constitution to require candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run as a team, the way candidates for U.S. president and vice president do, instead of running separately. The other would have required paper ballots in all North Carolina elections, eschewing direct recording or touch-screen voting machines.

    The House approved House Bill 436 Wednesday authorizing an oversight committee to study whether the governor and lieutenant governor should run on the same ballot line.

    "The proponents of this bill do not believe that it's a healthy situation that the governor and lieutenant governor should be of opposing parties," said Rep. Bert Jones, R-Rockingham, sponsor of the team-ticket bill.

    His original bill would have called for a team-ticket constitutional amendment making the change. If approved, it would have been on the November 2014 ballot. Instead, if approved by the Senate, a study committee would recommend language to next year's legislative session for a potential constitutional amendment.

    Jones said that states that have team-ticked elections generally conduct them in one of two ways.

    Under one method, the parties conduct separate primary elections for governor and lieutenant governor, with the winners running as a team in the general election.

    The other method has the winner of a party's gubernatorial primary picking his or her running mate.

    Jones also pushed the paper ballot measure (House Bill 607), which passed the House Thursday by a margin of 100-12.

    Jones said that 36 of the state's 100 counties currently use touch-screen voting machines. He said that the paper trail produced by those machines was not sufficient. He said he wanted to require voters to use paper ballots.

    He said ballots that are scanned, as in most North Carolina counties, would be sufficient.

    Rep. Michael Speciale, R-Craven, said he liked requiring paper ballots. He said he had trouble with a touch-screen machine when he went to vote for president.

    Rep. Frank Iler, R-Brunswick, disagreed. He said elections officials in Brunswick County didn't like requiring the change.

    "I think we'll be retraining poll workers," Iler said. "We'll be losing poll workers."