# North Carolina State Board of Elections The five-member board that administers elections in North Carolina and supervises the state's 100 county boards of elections. Its executive director — not the state's elected secretary of state — is North Carolina's designated chief state election official. [[Elaine Marshall]] has held the secretary of state's office since 1997 with no election responsibilities attached to it, which is why she passed through the post-2020 certification fights untouched while the State Board absorbed all of them. **The 2025 restructuring is the page's reason for existing.** Senate Bill 382, enacted over Governor Roy Cooper's veto in December 2024, moved the power to appoint the State Board from the **governor** to the **state auditor** — an office Republicans had just won for the first time in over a decade. The board's *design* did not change: it remained a five-member appointed body with the same statutory duties. Only the appointing authority moved. A new board was sworn in on **May 7, 2025**, and appointed **[[Sam Hayes]]** executive director, replacing Karen Brinson Bell; Hayes took office on **May 15, 2025**. This is the cleanest available example of a structural pattern the vault tracks elsewhere: reassigning who appoints a body is quieter, more durable, and less litigable than abolishing it, and it leaves every organizational chart looking unchanged. ## See Also - [[State Election Administration Tree]] — the board model and where North Carolina sits in it - [[Sam Hayes]] · [[Elaine Marshall]] - [[Ready to Register]] — the bulk-mailing operation it warned about on 1 July 2026 - [[Wisconsin Elections Commission]] — the other major state commission, restructured three times - [[How a Midterm Election Is Certified]]