# Elaine Marshall Elaine F. Marshall has been North Carolina's secretary of state since 1997, the first woman elected to statewide executive office in the state. She won an eighth consecutive term in November 2024; that term runs to January 1, 2029. Before that she served one term in the state senate, and in 1996 she unseated a NASCAR-backed incumbent to win the office she has held since. Her structural significance is what her office does **not** do. North Carolina is one of ten states where elections are administered by a board rather than by the secretary of state — the chief state election official is the executive director of the [[North Carolina State Board of Elections]]. Marshall's office handles business registrations, securities regulation, notaries, lobbyist registration, and trademarks, and has no role in voter registration, canvassing, or certification. That separation is the reason her tenure ran unbroken through the post-2020 period that consumed the political careers of secretaries of state in comparable states: the office everyone assumes runs elections in North Carolina never did. She is the standing counterexample to the assumption that "secretary of state" and "chief election official" are the same job. ## See Also - [[State Election Administration Tree]] — the taxonomy her office illustrates - [[North Carolina State Board of Elections]] · [[Sam Hayes]] - [[Brad Raffensperger]] — the contrast: an elected secretary of state who *is* the chief election official