Why do voters at Appalachian State keep getting picked on?

A new lawsuit is trying to overturn state laws that made it harder for students in Boone to have a voice in county politics. Who created those laws? A proud and powerful App State grad, that's who.

Folks, if you want proof that Boone is a frighteningly powerful town that is to be both loved and feared, then get a load of this recent news:

A federal lawsuit brought by voters Wednesday accuses the North Carolina legislature of forcing unconstitutional voting maps on Watauga County to help more Republican candidates win local elections.

The short version, as reported by NC Newsline and others, is this: Thanks to a a new state law in 2023, Watauga County’s voters went from being able to vote for all county commissioners (as they had for decades) to only the commissioners in their own districts. The law also changed the districts themselves, packing more voters into the areas that largely represent Appalachian State University and Boone, and putting fewer into areas that represent more Republican parts of the county. The result? A 3-2 Democratic majority on the commission became a 5-0 Republican majority after the 2024 election.

But! The previous county commission wasn’t happy that state lawmakers were messing with them, so they came up with their own county commission plan (three from districts, two at-large), put a referendum on the 2024 ballot, and watched it pass with an overwhelming 71% of the vote. There! Problem solved!

However! Months before the vote, the General Assembly passed another bill that aligned Watauga’s school board districts with the county commission. The same bill also blocked any referendum passed by voters from taking effect until after the 2032 elections. The bill passed in June. The referendum passed in November but, under the brand new law, couldn’t take effect for eight years.

So earlier this week a bunch of folks, including a former Democratic county commissioner, filed a federal lawsuit to reverse all of this. They said the bills passed in 2023 and 2024 violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, among other things. “There’s no doubt that politicians in Raleigh violated the law, ignored the will of voters, and trampled on the rights of Watauga County residents,” Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, said in a statement.

For more than a decade now, elections boards, vote challengers, lawmakers, and others have tried to tinker with the rules that allow college students to easily vote in the places where they go to school. Appalachian State seems to have been messed with quite a bit, and the school’s students have consistently fought back. So why do they get picked on so much? What’s so special about Boone? (Besides, you know, all of this stuff.) And why was the latest attempt to water down the votes of Appalachian State students led by, of all people, a man who was just named one of the university’s Distinguished Alumni?

Context Time!

For the last fifteen years or so, Republicans have been working the referees of electioneering on all levels, from Congress all the way down to local school boards. The state GOP has, since 2010, drawn electoral maps that give them a nearly unbeatable advantage in a state that’s close to 50-50 politically. In 2023, the new Republican majority on the state supreme court cleared the way for more overt partisan gerrymandering that turned a 7-7 Democratic-Republican split in Congress into a 10-4 GOP majority (new maps, which could skew even more Republican, may be on the way). State and local elections boards have traditionally had a majority that mirrors the party of the governor, but after Josh Stein’s election in 2024, lawmakers took that power away and allowed the Republican state auditor, Dave Boliek, to appoint a GOP majority on the State Board of Elections instead (that case is headed to the state supreme court). The law also allowed Boliek to appoint the chair of each county board of elections instead of the governor (North Carolina’s now the only state that does this), and so he picked Republicans, and now each county elections board has GOP control. He also just hired the former head of the state Republican party to be a liaison to local boards, or, in Boliek’s words, to be his “eyes and ears on the ground.”

So, yeah, you could be forgiven if you assumed that what’s happening in Watauga County is, you know, mayyyyybe a partisan move. But in this case, there’s some distinct local flavor. For at least the last 13 years, the GOP has shown that it really doesn’t like the fact that 23,000 college students and faculty are smack dab in the middle of their otherwise red county.

On election maps, Boone looks like a small blue walnut in an otherwise GOP-dominated county. How blue? During the 2024 election, Watauga County was the only mountain county other than Buncombe (Asheville!) that Kamala Harris won. Here’s another metric: There are early voting sites in both Boone and in the more rural parts of the county (including Meat Camp!). But the most popular site was at the Appalachian State student union, where Donald Trump got beat by a nearly 4-to-1 margin.

And if you’re wondering: Yes, the U.S. Census counted Appalachian State students as Watauga County residents in the 2020 Census. A little more than a third of the count'y’s population of 54,000 lives in Boone. Sure, other rural counties have colleges and universities in them. Proportionally, though, Appalachian State has a far larger potential effect on local politics. Yosef may look like a mountain man. But most of the time, he votes for Democrats.

A Long Fight over the Votes of College Students

The fight over where college students should be allowed to vote goes back decades. In the 1970s, a Meredith College student made headlines across the state when she tried to vote in Raleigh instead of in her hometown. Later, a 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision clarified that students are allowed to cast a ballot in their college towns, and a North Carolina law later said the same thing. Students are also allowed to run for office in their college towns. In 2013, a Republican activist in Pasquotank County tried to stop a senior at Elizabeth City State from getting on the ballot for city council. That activist lost by a unanimous decision in front of the GOP-led State Board of Elections. The student, Montravias King, won his election (and, 12 years later, is now running for city council In Charlotte).

When it comes to Appalachian State, though, the challenges have been, um, creative. Back in 2013 when I was a reporter with WCNC-TV, I went to Boone to cover a plan from the GOP-led county board of elections to combine that town’s three precincts into one. That would have removed Appalachian State’s campus polling place, and would have meant 9,000 voters would have had to vote at a single location with just 28 parking spaces. “I would find it a very strange coincidence if this weren’t entirely politically motivated,” App State political science professor Adam Newmark told me at the time.

(If you want to watch a much younger, cub reporter version of me dramatically taking a walk across town without sidewalks, you can watch that story below!)

The polling place was put back at the student union after outcry from the community and rulings from the state board of elections and the courts.

Then in 2016, the votes of two Appalachian State students were challenged over clerical errors that arose during their same-day registration. One student’s apartment number was left off his address by a poll worker, another listed his dorm room (which can’t accept mail) instead of his campus P.O. Box. In both cases, Republican challengers tried to toss their ballots because the mailing addresses couldn’t be verified the first time around. But the local board went on check and approve of the addresses and the students’ votes counted. Those two students then went on to challenge a bigger lawsuit that tried to use the same method to question 90,000 similar ballots statewide. The guy who was trying to stop those votes, Civitas Institute president Francis De Luca, didn’t win the lawsuit battle but he, in some ways, won the bigger war. This May, state auditor Dave Boliek appointed De Luca to the state board of elections. He’s now the chair. That Boliek guy! He’s everywhere! Shadow governor Dave Boliek! It’s Bolieks all the way down!

The address issue wasn’t settled, though. In 2022, another App State student, Sophie Mead, said she double-checked all of her info when she did same-day registration. But the worker who took the registration made a mistake in writing it down. Mead had no idea anything was wrong until after the election, when her vote was challenged by someone she didn’t know. She corrected the error. Her vote counted. The next year, in 2023, state lawmakers passed a bill that would have thrown out her vote, so Mead joined a lawsuit to block it. She and other plaintiffs won a settlement this past April, meaning if there are mistake with their addresses, people get a chance to correct them.

Still, though, lawmakers love to grumble about college students who vote, and often use their own kids to make their points. During a house committee meeting in 2023, state Rep. Jeff Zenger (a Republican from Forsyth County) went off topic and started musing about restricting college students from voting in their college towns. From a NC Newsline story:

Zenger explained how his daughter while a student at Appalachian State, actively worked to register university students to vote.

“That’s great. We want people to vote,” said Zenger. “[But] she said, the problem is that college students don’t understand the issues of the local politics or the local people. And she says, effectively, when you have a big university in a college town, the college students effectively have the ability to completely eliminate essentially the representation of the local people because they don’t understand the issues.”

“Sometimes they’re just voting, you know, for whatever reason.”

Zenger’s daughter thought that if students were still claimed as dependents by their parents, they should only be able to vote in elections where their parents live. When another lawmaker brought up some logistical questions—would this only apply for local elections?—Zenger said he wasn’t making a formal proposal. He was just throwing something out there for people to think about. “In a place like Chapel Hill or in Raleigh here with North Carolina State, there’s so much population here. It’s not going to make a difference,” Zenger noted. “[My daughter’s] observation was in Boone where you have 24,000 students, that makes a huge difference.”

Other lawmakers noted that state law and supreme court decisions were very clear about allowing college students to vote where wherever they lived, and the discussion ended.

He Loves App! And Yet!

Still, a decent amount of Republicans keep making an argument that college students, especially the ones in Boone, have too much political power in the counties where they go to school. “The citizens in Watauga County, their voice was not being heard,” Ronnie Marsh, a Republican county commission candidate, said at a forum in 2024. “Everything was being housed around the city limits of Boone and around the university.”

Ralph Hise was swayed by similar arguments. In 2023, when his state senate district was redrawn (in part by him, since he’s on an elections committee and helped with redistricting), Hise represented Watauga County for the first time. That also gave him, for the first time, the ability to file a local bill to change Watauga’s county commission and school board districts. During a hearing in 2023, Hise said he was motivated to change the county districts because of “the predominance of the university and others in the electoral process,” and that he introduced his changes because of “a longtime standing conflict between the influence of the university and others within the county.”

Sen. Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell). (Photo: Galen Bacharier/NC Newsline)

Hise has had a relationship with Appalachian State since he was a kid. While he was growing up in Spruce Pine, he’d ride up to campus while his mom was getting her master’s degree there. His dad took him to Mountaineer football games. When it came time to go to college, he only applied to one school.

After graduating from Appalachian State in 2000 with a degree in statistics, Hise worked in Washington, D.C. and Georgia before returning to Raleigh to crunch numbers for the Bush-Cheney campaign. He later moved back to his hometown of Spruce Pine and became mayor. In 2009, he was inspired to run for state senate after he accused his local legislator, Democrat Joe Sam Queen, of making it too hard for a wind power farm to be set up near his town. Hise won, and at age 35, became the youngest Republican lawmaker in Raleigh. He still lives in Mitchell County today.

Thanks to his rise to power and his love for his alma mater, Appalachian State named Hise as one of its Distinguished Alumni in 2024. The university noted that Hise has been consistently recognized as one of the “most effective state lawmakers,” and that App State has gotten a lot of money during his time in office. “I guess I’ve always viewed myself as the biggest fan of Appalachian,” he said in a university video last year. “It gave me the opportunity to kind of turn everything around. It’s given that to so many other students as well. I just couldn’t be more proud to represent Appalachian or the Boone area.”

As proud as he was to represent Boone, he never actually cast a ballot there. Voter records show Hise has voted in every single election since he turned 18. During his time at Appalachian State, those records show he made the hour-long drive from campus back to Spruce Pine to vote in person. When he lived elsewhere, including in grad school at N.C. State, he voted absentee.

Hence, plenty of App State students have voted in Watauga County. Hise was never one of them.

So! Why did Hise intervene? And why did he do it as soon as he had the chance? On Friday, I sent him a list of questions about the lawsuit (He’s mentioned in the suit quite a bit but, for what it’s worth, the suit only names the Watauga County Board of Elections as a defendant). I also asked about bills he introduced. I also wanted to know how he felt—as a proud App State grad—about being accused of diluting the local political power of the students at his alma mater. If he gets back to me, I’ll let you know. As far as I can tell, he’s never responded to any reporters about his Watauga elections bills.

The clues about his motivation come only from his comments before senate committees. “Watauga County is unique in the concept that in a county of 55,000 people you have a university on a very small footprint of temporary and four-year residents that represent 20,000 individuals in that county,” he told his fellow lawmakers in June 2024. That produces “a lot of … complaints about the influence that those temporary residents have in these kind of elections.” Those complaints, he said, led him to change the way local politics are structured.

A month later, Appalachian State honored Hise as its latest Distinguished Alumni. “We’re going to make sure that all of North Carolina knows where Boone is,” Hise said as he accepted his award. “I still owe a great debt to this school.”