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I hope everyone had a wonderful Passover and Easter break! Next week, the General Assembly will convene for the 2026 'short' session. Normally, this is a time for budget adjustments and leftover policy items that almost made it across the finish line in 2025. This session may also have items that continue the good work that was done in 2025 regarding public safety. Also, this is the session in which reports from the oversight committees are turned into proposed legislation. Over the interim, there have been several joint (House and Senate members) committees that have met to discuss a variety of topics like Medicaid, transportation, public safety, and Helene recovery. And, of course, Lydia and I have been busy in the district meeting with different groups on a variety of topics.
The first item of business for the Senate will be to seat a new member. Sen. Graig Meyer resigned in February, and Sen. Jonah Garson will be officially seated as the new senator for District 23 (Orange, Caswell, and Person counties). I expect the 2026 session to be a very productive session. You can follow along with what is going on in Raleigh by looking at the legislative calendar. There you will find the links to the committee meetings and to the audio of the sessions. In fact, just about every Senate committee has a dashboard that allows you to see the text of the bills being discussed. This committee dashboard works similarly to the dashboard for the Senate Chamber. https://www.ncleg.gov/LegislativeCalendar
Sincerely,
Warren Daniel
ELECTION INTEGRITY UPDATE
On April 16, the State Board of Elections announced that it will soon check the citizenship of all registered voters in North Carolina against federal databases to identify and remove any non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls. The board approved new rules at its meeting today for a process that must be followed before a voter is removed. Voters’ names, dates of birth, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers will be run through the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, which will provide information on any possible noncitizens. The State Board recently entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for this purpose.
In March, the federal courts upheld the NC Voter ID law. This was a seven-year court battle over a provision that put into action a constitutional amendment that was approved by over 60% of the voters in North Carolina.
Also in March, a federal judge agreed that NC could safeguard same-day registration ballots with the new voter verification provisions of SB747.
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