Friday, American Oversight released letters sent to the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor (OSA) and North Carolina State Board of Elections (BOE) calling for immediate action to recover public records deleted by former elections liaison Dallas Woodhouse and urging the BOE to subpoena him for testimony about the deleted records. The missing records could shed more light on OSA officials’ efforts to influence county election boards’ early voting plans.
The letters follow the release of new records we obtained, reported on by NC Newsline, including texts from Woodhouse’s personal phone showing OSA officials and staff communicating with county election officials in an effort to influence their decisions about early voting plans. The records also raise serious questions about State Auditor Dave Boliek’s involvement and apparent coordination between Woodhouse and North Carolina Republican Party officials on some of those decisions.
The records take on added significance in light of OSA’s recent admission that some of Woodhouse’s messages remain missing. In response to our continued efforts to obtain relevant records, OSA’s General Counsel informed us that Woodhouse, who previously led the state GOP, deleted messages from his phone despite explicit instructions to preserve them and “in direct contravention of OSA policy.” Although OSA ultimately released more than 100 pages of texts collected from Woodhouse’s personal phone, the agency acknowledged “that not all of Woodhouse’s texts were successfully backed up to or downloaded from his iCloud.” The unrecovered messages could provide critical information about the full extent of OSA officials’ involvement in local early voting decisions.
“The BOE and OSA must act immediately to recover the public records Dallas Woodhouse deleted and hold him accountable for destroying them,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “Woodhouse should be required to answer under oath what records he deleted, when, and why. The records that survived show OSA officials working to influence local early voting decisions, from Sunday voting to polling sites on college campuses, while invoking Republican Party preferences and communicating with party officials about some of those decisions. They also raise serious questions about Auditor Boliek’s role in these efforts. The public deserves to know whether officials entrusted with overseeing elections used their positions to advance partisan interests and restrict voting access.”
Under North Carolina law, the chair has authority to issue subpoenas, summon witnesses, and compel the production of evidence, while any two members can exercise the same authority in the chair’s absence or “refusal to act.”
With the BOE scheduled to meet on August 20 to decide disputed early voting plans involving Sunday voting and other voter-access issues, we are urging the board to defer action until Woodhouse has answered questions under oath about the deleted messages and any missing records have been recovered and made public. The public currently has until August 17 to comment on the nonunanimous early voting plans. Our letter calls on the BOE to extend that deadline so any recovered records can be considered by the public before the plans are finalized.
The records released by OSA came after we pressed the agency last month over its failure to produce Woodhouse’s communications. The auditor’s office has since acknowledged that it did not begin collecting additional responsive texts until media reports in July revealed their existence and maintains that, because Woodhouse has resigned, it no longer has access to his personal devices or accounts to retrieve any public records that may remain there.
