IN BOX: N.C. Senate Passes Bill Prohibiting Private Funding of Election Administration | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Donna Martinez.

    N.C. Senate Republicans released the following statement Monday afternoon. For more information about election integrity, visit Locke's Civitas Center for Public Integrity.

    Raleigh, N.C. - The North Carolina Senate today advanced to Gov. Roy Cooper's desk a measure, Senate Bill 725, to prohibit private funding of elections administration. Recent polling shows startling percentages of voters across all ideologies question whether the 2022 election will be "free and fair."

    Sen. Paul Newton, who co-chairs the Senate Elections Committee, said, "Private interests paying for vote collection and counting raises natural suspicions about election integrity."

    Sen. Newton continued, "There is nothing more quintessential to the role of government than funding and administering elections. Strangely, Democrats want them funded by private interests. Do they really think that private funding for elections increases, rather than decreases, the public's confidence in the vote-counting process?"

    Democrats seem to be falling prey yet again to the "Fox News Fallacy," a term coined by prominent Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira to describe Democrats' reflexive opposition to reasonable positions. As Teixeira explains it, "The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bęte noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often."