It's 505 and welcome in to a Wednesday edition of the Carolina Journal News Hour on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT, I'm Nick Craig. Good morning to you. We start off with some public safety news and some discussions out of the North Carolina General Assembly as the Senate Judiciary Committee and its leaders are reviewing ethics compliance, potential conflicts of interest, and a history of progressive policing policies ahead of a confirmation hearing for Governor Josh Stein's nominee to lead the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, an individual by the name of Jeffrey Smythe Smythe, appointed in January after Eddie Buffalo's retirement, the former head of the Department of Public Safety, is a former Burlington police chief and currently a city council member. The North Carolina Department of Public Safety oversees major state public safety functions, including prisons, emergency management, highway patrol, and local agency coordination. In a letter sent a month ago, according to DPS Secretary Jeffrey Smythe, Senators Danny Britt, the Republican from Robinson, Warren Daniel, the Republican from Burke, and Buck Newton, the Republican from Winston, Wilson County, said that the committee is undertaking a review of ethics, compliance, and conflicts of interest connected to Smythe's nomination.
The senators cited Smythe's simultaneous service as acting DPS secretary and as a member of the Burlington City Council. Just a little over a week later, Smythe pushed back in a May the 22nd response, telling senators that the State Ethics Commission had been made aware of his Burlington City Council role and, quote, determined that my service on council does not create a conflict of interest, end quote. Smythe also said that he had discussed potential conflicts with his general counsel and no conflicts had arisen at this point. He went on in his letter to say, should I be confirmed, I am fully prepared to take all appropriate actions to address any conflicts of interest that may arise up to and including resignation from the Burlington City Council if a conflict cannot be avoided. My priority remains serving all North Carolinians as the Secretary of the Department of Public Safety.
This exchange comes as Smite's nomination moves towards a Senate review and as lawmakers have begun receiving letters of support from police leaders across the state according to materials reviewed recently by Carolina Journal. Those support letters point to Smite's decade in law enforcement, his tenure as the Burlington Police Chief, and his work overseeing law enforcement standards at the Department of Justice. Taken together, the ethics letter, Smythe's response, and the need for express support highlight two core conflicts at the center of his confirmation, whether Smythe can serve effectively as both a local elected official and as the state's public safety chief, and whether his record aligns with more mainstream law enforcement or activist-driven policing agendas post-2020. In a statement provided to Carolina Journal, a spokesperson for Governor Josh Stein defended his pick for DPS secretary as the right person for the job, citing his extensive public safety resume. Stein's office said in part, Jeff Smythe is a second-generation law enforcement officer who has dedicated nearly four decades to protecting people.
As the Burlington police chief, Smythe brought drug trafficking to justice, worked to break up gangs, and took illegal and stolen guns off of our streets. His commitment to public safety as a police chief impressed the governor when he was attorney general, so he hired Smythe to direct the Criminal Standards Division at the Department of Justice. There, Smythe dramatically reduced the time it took for law enforcement officers to get certified and manage the unit well. Governor Stein was proud to appoint him the Secretary of Public Safety and looks forward to continuing to partner with him to keep North Carolina safe. But the same record that Stein praised includes several episodes that are likely to become flashpoints during the confirmation hearing, particularly for lawmakers skeptical of racial equality initiatives, identity-based training, and activist-driven police reform.
A spokesperson for Senate Republicans told the Carolina Journal that Smythe's record raises some broader questions about the department's direction, with the spokeswoman telling CJ, safety and security are top of mind for North Carolinians. They want to feel safe whether they're at home or out and about living their daily lives. They deserve a Department of Public Safety secretary who is laser-focused on protecting them and locking up violent criminals, not generating feel-good headlines or to far-left activists. The confirmation process now places Smythe's full record before senators who will decide whether his background represents steady law enforcement leadership or record too closely aligned with activist-driven criminal justice policies to lead North Carolina's top public safety agencies.
So diving into the two different issues here in June of 2020, Smythe attended a George Floyd protest at North Park in Burlington and accepted a sign reading, End Police Brutality. Smythe brought the sign back to the department when he was the head of the Burlington Police Department so that officers on duty could pose with it in a show of solidarity with those left-wing protesters. There were also many other progressive policing policies raised from Smythe's tenure. In a letter to the group called Eight Can't Wait in that campaign, Burlington police said the department met or exceeded the national campaign's recommendations in several areas. The campaign launched during the George Floyd protests pushed police agencies to adopt policies such as banning choke.
Requiring a de-escalation, requiring warning before shooting, and requiring officers to intervene when witnessing excessive force. In separate responses to Alamance Agents for Change, a local activist group pressing law enforcement agencies to change policies and practices, Burlington officials addressed issues including a use of force policy, transparency, officer discipline, and the handling of officers accused of misconduct or associated with quote hate groups. In that response, Smythe described several reform-oriented actions already underway at the department. He wrote that the Burlington police had continued sending personnel to racial equity institute trainings and said a grant would allow additional staff to attend. The same materials say Smythe also pointed to a Burlington policy governing police contacts and searches involving transgender individuals.
describing it as the first known policy of its kind in the state of North Carolina, noting that it had been designed and vetted by the ACLU, which tends to be a left-of-center activist agency. Smythe later became involved with the state-level Task Force for Racial Equality and Criminal Justice, known as TREC, as the director of the Criminal Justice Standards Division and a member of the local policy committee. Former Democrat Governor Roy Cooper created that task force in June of 2020 after George Floyd's death with Stein and then North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Anita Earls as co-chairs. The task force was charged with examining racial disparities in the criminal justice system and recommending policy changes. That group's work went well, far beyond general calls for training or transparency.
The task force eventually issued 125 recommendations touching nearly every stage of the criminal justice system, including policing, officer discipline, school resource officers, juvenile justice, sentencing, incarceration, re-entry, and victim services. Among its most sweeping recommendations, the group called for North Carolina to quote, reimagine public safety and reinvest in communities. That included responding differently to situations involving mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, and other non-emergency situations. With the task force also recommending funding grassroots organizations and community violence prevention programs, shifting some public safety emphasis outside of traditional law enforcement structures. Other recommendations went directly to police tactics and investigations, with the TREC calling for law enforcement to use data and objective criteria rather than officers' subjective perceptions and beliefs to determine the level of police presence in neighborhoods.
It also recommended de-emphasizing felony drug possession arrests for trace quantities under a quarter gram, prioritizing traffic stops that improve traffic safety. And requiring written, informed consent for all consent searches provided by law enforcement. The recommendations also reached police accountability and discipline, with the group calling for the strengthening use of force policies, establishing early intervention systems for officers who repeatedly have use of force policies, expanding local citizen oversight boards, and expanding authority to suspend, revoke, or deny officer certifications for excessive force or abuse of power. Smythe won a seat on the Burlington City Council in November after campaigning on his experience as the city's former police chief and his long-standing formality with city government. In an interview not long after that with the Alamance News before taking office, Smythe said that he decided to run because Burlington was facing a leadership vacuum.
With the mayor and two council members leaving or seeking other offices, Smyth said his eight years as police chief gave him prior knowledge about the city that he could bring to the council. The interview also added political context to Smythe's local support. The Alamance News reported during his time as police chief, Smythe said that he had, quote, endeared himself to many political progressives through outreach to minority groups that he felt excluded from city leadership. The background on that goes on. And so this is going to be a very interesting discussion to watch take place as the North Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee gets ready to have a formal process in place to review Governor Josh Stein's pick to lead the North Carolina Department of Public Safety in Jeffrey Smythe.
We've got a lengthy article over on our website, CarolinaJournal.com, that goes through all of the background. Look for the story with the headline, Stein DPS pick faces Senate scrutiny. Scrutiny over ethics and policing record. At the Zebra, we save you money on auto insurance, like Jessica, who saved hundreds. Small weekend, here I come.
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Savings will vary, not all will save. Uh It's 5:21. Welcome back to the Carolina Journal News Hour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT. Here in the middle of June, we are keeping a very close eye on the North Carolina General Assembly as lawmakers do plan to have the legislative short session wrapped up here in the next couple of weeks as we approach the July the 4th holiday. Have no fear, we've seen these deadlines and dates on the calendar before, only for lawmakers to blow quickly by them.
But we're tracking a lot of interesting progress, including House Bill 958 to walk through some of those details this morning. Dr. Andy Jackson from the John Locke Foundation joins us on the Carolina Journal News Hour. Andy, yesterday morning on Tuesday, there was a very interesting committee meeting that happened in the North Carolina House, their elections committee meeting, bringing back a bill from the legislative long session. This is another wide-sweeping election bill.
We've seen these bills in the past, Senate Bill 747 back a couple of years ago. House Bill 958 seems to also have some of these pretty wide-sweeping changes. Walks through some of the details as you understand them right now. And again, before you get into that, we'll note that there's a high level of uncertainty with this legislation moving forward, but there's a lot, Jim. impact in here.
There's a lot. It is a real omnibus elections bill. It covers a whole lot of things. And I'll just hit a few of the high points here. One of the things it does is actually something that Democrats probably would like to see because it was a complaint they had.
There was a time where in a previous bill where they cut the amount of time that the boards of elections had to deal with absentee ballots and provisional ballots from essentially nine days after election day down to three. They're growing that back out to five business days, essentially giving election officials a week to sort through some of these late-breaking absentee ballots, absentee ballots that need to be cured, which means they have to fix a problem with it, or provisional ballots. Those are people that voted in person that had problems with their ballots. In addition, they're allowed to start counting absentee ballots that arrived the day before election day, earlier in the day, before they could not start counting until 5 p.m.
now. They can start earlier in the day as long as they provide public notice. And there's a bunch of other ones. There's a ban of rate choice voting. That's where instead of just voting for who you like, you'll say, This is my first, my most favorite candidate, my second most favorite, and so on and so forth.
Which would especially be perhaps useful in the primaries, but they're going to ban that option in this bill. It also expands a ban on electioneering activities by election board members, up to and including supporting or opposing political parties. Right now, you can only oppose, you know, the ban only applies to opposing or supporting candidates, and also not encouraging turnout, especially when in the context of supporting or opposing parties or candidates. Another thing, and I'll before I hand this back to you, this is going to clarify that military and overseas voters are subject to the voter ID law, so that will require them to submit copies of their voter ID. There is a host of other things.
This is a large bill. We could spend a lot of time talking about everything that's in here.
Well, and I suspect over the next couple of weeks, again, as we continue to watch its progress and some level of uncertainty how quickly this will happen, we'll do that. All right, Andy, let's jump into a couple of things that you dove into. Walk me through this earlier counting of absentee ballots. As I understand it right now, the state or the county board of elections, excuse me, have to wait until 5 p.m. to do that on Election Day.
This gives them the ability to start as early as you noted, as long as the public window threshold for a meeting is taking place as early as 9 a.m. on Election Day. Will that help results come in quicker? What exactly does this mean for all 100 county board of elections? It certainly could help results come in a little quicker.
The main thing it does is it relieves some of this time pressure that boards have because they're dealing with whatever last-minute issues they have to do with election day voting, getting ready to run the tabulators or get the counts in and reported for early voting, getting ready for that 7:30 close or sometimes later if there are problems somewhere and the court orders them to extend it.
So there's a lot going on in that period. And then adding the absentee ballot tabulation at five o'clock in that kind of real crunch time was making it difficult for election officials.
Now, traditionally, they ran those tabulators, and I've been there for those. They would run those tabulators early to mid-afternoon. I expect most county boards will return to that timeframe. And so that way, if people want to observe those counts, they can do that. And so, yeah, that essentially makes it easier on the boards, especially on election.
Day to get their jobs done. Yeah, and I've talked to some folks that work in various county boards, and they say the beginning of the day is obviously very chaotic as polls open at 6:30. And then around that 7:30 timeframe, when polls close as well, also very chaotic. And some of them have described to me the middle of the day as relatively calm, which seems amazing on election day for county election officials and other board members.
So, some pretty good progress there. This caught my eye. You've got it listed in your article over at the John Locke Foundation website. Only legally transmitted ballots count, and this deals with individuals who are requesting an absentee by mail ballot. This, I guess, clarifies which forms of legal delivery could count.
Walk me through what the relevance is here.
Well, there is, and this is an issue that goes back to guidance that the State Board of Elections gave the county boards back in 2020. They have these things called number memos. Those are not law and those are not official regulations, but they're supposed to point to law and official regulations.
So they, at least in theory, carry some weight of law behind them.
Well, the executive director at the time, Karen Brinson Bell, said that a county board shall not disapprove. Disapprove an absentee ballot solely because it was delivered by someone who was not authorized to possess the ballot. Ballot harvesting is illegal in North Carolina with some very narrow exceptions. And those are only for people who are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act because they can designate anybody to transmit their ballot. But for most of us, you either have to put it in the mail or a near relative or a guardian can deliver it on your behalf, or you can deliver it yourself.
And there's a couple of other areas, military overseas, they could go through an absentee ballot portal. And finally, there is an online portal for people with Vision disabilities for people that are legally blind, they can submit a ballot through that. And those are some fairly narrow exceptions. And so, if, for example, somebody goes out, takes a bathroom break at the Board of Elections, comes back, and there's a handful of returned ballots on their desk, they don't know where they came from.
Well, under the old guidance, well, you're going to count them. Under the new guidance, you're going to at least have to contact the voter. And you're probably going to have to tell them you're going to, since we don't know how these ballots got here, unless we can determine that, we're not going to be able to count these. You're either going to have to resubmit the ballot or vote another way. Yeah, you talk about those very clear exceptions that are listed out in state law.
This was one of the things that was discussed during this relatively brief House Elections Committee hearing that happened on early Tuesday morning. Military and overseas voter ID, you mentioned this in your open as well. Voter ID has now been on the books here for a couple of years in North Carolina, Andy. We've been through municipal, presidential, and midterm election cycles with voter ID here on the book. Obviously, for most people here in North Carolina, you show a driver's license or some other form of state-issued ID.
There's obviously a larger list of IDs that are accepted. But for those serving overseas, we do have a lot of military members here in North Carolina serving across the globe. They obviously are not able to do that during the early voting period or election day, but they do still have to follow that voter ID law, correct? They do. And this is a clarification.
One of the problems here is that there is a separate chapter in election law in North Carolina that deals with military and overseas voters. And so there was some question about whether or not the voter ID law that is in one chapter applied to this one. Or is the military and overseas chapter kind of a collective whole that is totally separate from all other election law? There had been different interpretations of that. I'm one of the people that says, yes, voter ID applies.
And so this law would just clarify exactly where we fall on that question.
So military and overseas will have to submit photocopies of their photo IDs with their ballots. We'll continue the conversation with Dr. Andy Jackson from the John Locke Foundation coming up after this. You're listening to the Carolina Journal News Hour. It's 5.38.
Welcome back to the Carolina Journal News Hour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT, I'm Nick Craig. Good Wednesday morning to you. Continuing our conversation this morning with Dr. Andy Jackson from the John Locke Foundation over a major piece of legislation being discussed in the North Carolina General Assembly dealing with elections. Let's dive into a couple of other issues as we continue our discussion on this wide-sweeping election bill, House Bill 958.
It's certainty, relatively uncertain in the North Carolina General Assembly today. One of the big ones is dealing with performance audits of elections across the state. This was the commentary from multiple Democrats during this House election committee that happened yesterday morning. Andy, they seem to indicate or argue, and some said brazenly, that this was going to be used as a political weapon by state auditor Dave. Bollock against counties or areas in the state that either he or his friends that are running for political office aren't doing well.
As I understood it, the state auditor already had the authority to audit pretty much anything in North Carolina government prior to this discussion in this legislation. Yes, the authority of the Office of the State Auditor to perform audits on government agencies, state agencies, including the State Board of Elections, is broad. And so, if the auditor really wanted to, they could have set up a program where they would begin these audits. The thing that this law does is it adds clarity about the intent of the law, the purpose behind it, what they're going to be doing as part of that process, what documents and deliverables they're going to be providing to the General Assembly, the governor, and other officials. It also clarifies that any of the counties, officials from the counties that are noted in that audit, will be given an opportunity to respond to whatever the findings are from the audit.
And so, And this thing also covers all the way from voter registration to making sure that all the ballot, the chain of custody of the ballots is secure through the entire process.
So this is really an A to Z audit. It is not designed to overturn or question the outcome of an election. As a matter of fact, the law specifically says that these are going to be performed after certification and that they're not going to be used as grounds to challenge the final result of an election. That's not what these are for. These are for helping county boards and the state board kind of get what I call a cycle of continuous improvement.
We go through an election cycle, we run these audits, we see where there are problems, and then the county boards and the state board can address those problems. And perhaps the General Assembly can pass relevant laws to address these problems that are discovered. I have been supporting this for a long time after I saw the results of a U. An audit in Utah where they found problems that were in two of the counties there. Those counties said, in one case, hey, there wasn't really a problem.
The other one said, I'm sorry, I made a mistake, we'll fix it. But in both cases, they found problems and they addressed problems. That's the kind of thing I want for North Carolina, where we can have an outside group looking in and seeing what the issues are and giving election officials the opportunity to fix it. And also, this provides a means of having a third party say, Hey, these are issues that we need the General Assembly to address, perhaps with more money if needed for training or equipment or whatnot. And so I think this is a real opportunity in North Carolina to help us have a better election system ongoing.
And that is something that state lawmakers that were pushing this legislation and remain pushing this legislation made in terms of their plea to lawmakers from both the Republican and Democrat Party, as election integrity does remain a major issue and topic of conversation across the state here in North Carolina. There's another thing that you've highlighted in your article over at the johnlock.org website, Andy, a ban payment per petition signature. This is something that you've already spoken to the North Carolina State Board of Elections through public testimony. Give me a situation where something like this unfolds, and where do you fall on it?
Well, this this is this especially where there's two areas where you where the one main area we get it is when we're trying to get new parties. In North Carolina, you have to have a petition process. A lot of times, these parties or interested third parties that want to see a party get on the ballot in North Carolina will hire people to gather signatures.
Now, that wouldn't be banned under this law, but what would be banned is a payment per signature. And obviously, in a situation like that, the opportunity for corruption is large because you'll get people with a real incentive to get as many names, whether they're real or not, on that process. It gunks up the works. It introduces corruption into the beginning of a political party. And it really has no place in our election system.
So you can still have people paid to gather signatures. You just can't pay them per signature. You imagine a situation where some group is paying you a dollar per signature, and Andy, over the couple of weeks or a couple of months, you run up a couple thousand signatures, maybe some of them being non-legitimate signatures. That could be a pretty hefty payday for individuals. Great point there.
All right, let's let me let me ask you on this. You've got something in here called protection from fake party members. We've seen a lot of discussion on both sides of the political aisle in primaries over the last couple of years here in North Carolina with individuals that are called party switchers. They meet this threshold, which I believe was previously 90 days before the candidate filing open. They switch their party affiliation, some cases, Republican to Democrat, Democrat to Republican, or unaffiliated to one of the either parties, and then they can run in that primary.
This legislation, House Bill 958, looks to make some changes to that. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, it is probably a good idea because what, and we saw this mainly on the Republican side. There were groups that were trying to put their members On the Republican ballot. Most of these were people that already had Republicans that were running.
There was at least one case where somebody changed Republican and ran unopposed for that. And so what you have is a situation where you have a bunch of people switching in late August, early September, just in time to qualify for that 90-day window. This would make it 365. It would show at least some kind of commitment, either a commitment to a party or commitment to the job of switching over and infiltrating. At least you're going to have to think about these things well ahead of time instead of doing it at a relative last minute.
There is a stipulation in that law that would allow the central executive committees of both parties, major parties and the minor parties, so any party, to grant a waiver.
So if there is somebody like an Ike Eisenhower situation where you really want this person to run on your party, you could, your party could. Could grant a waiver to that 365-day requirement.
So it does provide that kind of backdoor for the parties while preventing people from essentially infiltrating the party primary process.
Well, and outside of the infiltration of that process, Andy, we do see a lot of folks in North Carolina, our largest voting bloc, as you and I have talked about now. I don't even know how many dozens of times does remain unaffiliated. And we've seen right-leaning unaffiliated voters switch their party affiliation to Republican and run in Republican primaries. And the same thing on the other side, where left-leaning unaffiliated voters switching their party affiliation and running as Democrats. For these individuals, it would definitely force them to plot this plan out.
If they do want to run for some sort of elected office, whether we're talking about the legislature, county commission, town council seat, whatever it might be, it would require those individuals to at least have this in their mind a year beforehand and jump to one party or the other if they are an unaffiliated voter. Yeah, and yeah, so once again, two ways. One, they'd either have to think about ahead of time, join in. You know, under our current system, we have semi-closed primaries, which allows unaffiliated to vote.
So there's not, I mean, an either party primary, so there's not really an incentive to be registered with the party and all that entails.
So where people could look up your record and say, oh, this person is a Republican or a Democrat, and now I don't like this person or whatever. There are some people that feel a little safer being unaffiliated or non-committed to anything. And so you'll have people that may vote most of the time with one party or other. Most unaffiliated do. And so you do have a situation where if there's a person who is not registered with the party, but they quack like a duck, they walk like a duck, and they are recognized by that party as being, okay, this person really is one of us.
We know that person. Then the system grants that potential for a waiver.
So the county party. Could say, we'd like to have this person run for the nomination in our party here. Could you go ahead to the Central Committee, ask for the waiver from the State Board of Elections?
So there's still that way to let people that are maybe unaffiliated but are definite leaners. to get in there without having to do it a year ahead of time. Yeah, and if this legislation moves forward, it could be very interesting to watch this, and you might start seeing people getting a hint even a year in advance of somebody running for political office if they, in fact, do change their party affiliation. Andy, let's round up the conversation on this: ranked choice voting. There's been a lot of national discussion on this in a variety of different states over the last couple of years.
This legislation would, in fact, ban that in North Carolina. Do we currently have any sort of ranked choice voting in the Tar Heel State? We don't now. We experimented with it in the 20 oughts. I think around 2008, they allowed ranked choice voting in some local elections.
It didn't really stick in the state. But right now, there's a national push for ranked choice voting. They call it ranked choice voting rather than ranked choice voting, which is the kind of norm. And so there's a big. Nationwide push for it.
And so there's been a counter push mostly from the right against it. And so this is saying, well, Before, let's nip this thing in the bud before that push comes here. For people that are not familiar with it, this is something that rather than choosing, I want to vote for Jon Snow over Lisa Smith, for example, you'll say, I want candidate A to be my first and candidate C to be my second choice. And so you'll rank them all the way up until you have one candidate left that's not ranked. And then, if nobody has a majority, they kind of eliminate the bottom and go recount this process.
It makes the ballot process longer and so increases the potential for lines during early voting. It's a little more complicated, which could increase the chance for voter confusion. And it makes the counting, at least potentially, a lot longer because you're having to run these things through the tabulators multiple times over several days or even weeks. And we have, in fact, seen that in states where they do have this ranked or ranked choice voting, depending on the verbiage that they use to describe it with those very lengthy timelines to get those election results. Andy, we've gone through a lot here this morning.
Again, the way forward for House Bill 958 does remain a little bit in limbo this morning. You've got a phenomenal right up over on the website, johnloc.org. We encourage our audience to go check that out. We'll be keeping a very close eye on its progress in the North Carolina General Assembly through the remainder of this month. We appreciate all the information and insight this morning.
Dr. Andy Jackson from the John Locke Foundation joins us on the Carolina Journal News Hour. Good morning again. It's 5.55. Welcome back to the Carolina Journal News Hour, Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM.
WBT, I'm Nick Craig. A good Wednesday morning to you. Continuing our coverage, as we were just chatting with Dr. Andy Jackson from the John Locke Foundation about House Bill 958, which is a pretty widesweeping election law change piece of legislation. This legislation did go through committee yesterday, did receive a favorable report out of the House Elections Committee.
It was set to be heard yesterday afternoon in the House Rules Committee.
However, as soon as that meeting gaveled in yesterday, the chair presiding over that committee meeting announced that that legislation would not be taken up yesterday at the meeting.
However, there is one of those meetings again today, House Rules Calendar and Operations of the House. They are set to gavel in at 10 o'clock this morning. This legislation would have to be introduced and passed by the General Assembly within the next couple of days if lawmakers would look to pass this into law and get it signed and onto Governor Josh Stein's desk before the July the 4th holiday when lawmakers are set to vacate Raleigh for the remainder of the year. This legislation would have to pass first the full House and the Senate, then go to the governor's desk for a signature. The governor has up to 10 days where he can wait before signing a piece of legislation and then either veto it or sign it into law.
After that period of time, it becomes law automatically. And if lawmakers have already determined they are not coming back for any additional business, there would not be the ability for a veto override.
So as I mentioned a couple of times as we chatted with Dr. Andy Jackson, this bill moving forward does have some pretty high levels of uncertainty. We'll be watching that very closely in Raleigh throughout the remainder of this week. That's going to do it for a Wednesday edition of the Carolina Journal News Hour. WBT News is next, followed by Good Morning BT.
We're back with you tomorrow morning, 5 to 6, right here on Charlotte's FM News Talk, 107.9 FM, WBT.
