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UPDATE: On Tuesday, the State Board of Elections voted unanimously to affirm the decision of the Rockingham County Board of Elections and let Gibson remain on the ballot.
Donald Trump isn’t the only candidate facing efforts to remove him from the ballot this year.
In Rockingham County, just north of the Triad, there’s Joseph A. Gibson III.
Local and state Republican leaders have tried to keep Gibson, a neo-Nazi podcaster, from running for a state House seat on their ticket, though his stated affinity for Adolf Hitler is not the grounds cited in their official challenge.
The legal questions are about Gibson’s felony convictions in the 1990s and early 2000s, and whether he has fulfilled the conditions to restore his right to vote. The state constitution requires legislative candidates to be eligible voters.
So far, there have been three hearings in the challenge to Gibson’s candidacy. The Rockingham County Board of Elections voted unanimously to disqualify Gibson on January 3. But Gibson, who didn’t attend that hearing, appealed to the state Board of Elections.
The state board determined that the county attorney gave the elections board incorrect information about how voting rights are restored, and sent the case back to the county board. The county board held a new hearing last Wednesday, starting with a completely different explanation of the relevant laws and, for the first time, heard testimony from the candidate himself.
Gibson arrived, out of breath and in a rumpled suit, about 25 minutes late and without a lawyer. Under state law, he had the burden of proving, by a preponderance of the evidence, that he should not be disqualified for running for office.
Gibson told the board he had worked as a confidential informant while incarcerated in Connecticut for property theft, and that some of the criminal charges against him were fabricated to facilitate that undercover work. A federal judge sealed his record, he said, so much of the information that Stephen Wiley, the House Republicans’ caucus director, compiled from public records should never have been public.
“I infiltrated a gang, you know, so in 1999, when my throat was slashed open—16 staples, almost died—that’s when the judge sealed all my records. I kind of like, put it all in my past,” Gibson said.
After that date, however, Gibson filed two cases in federal court that related to his time in prison, and some of those records, which Wiley discovered in his research, corroborated that Gibson was imprisoned from 1991 to 1999 and mentioned further incarceration from 2001 to 2004.
In one federal case, Gibson sued his former parole officer, alleging that the officer was liable for the 1999 stabbing, which Gibson attributed to the Latin Kings, the gang he said he infiltrated. He suggested the parole officer may have set up the attack. The judge raised issues about Gibson’s credibility in her decision favoring the parole officer.
Gibson told the Rockingham County board that he moved to North Carolina in 2005 while still on parole and was released from supervision in 2008 or 2009. He provided several documents to the board, but none indicated that he had been released from all forms of state supervision and paid all fines and fees related to felony charges. One document, which initially seemed to do the trick, pertained to a more recent misdemeanor.
Board members understood their task to be determining whether Gibson met the standard of “unconditional discharge” following a felony conviction. If he had been released and paid all money due, his voting rights would likely have been automatically restored under Connecticut and North Carolina law, clearing the way for his campaign. If not, Gibson’s votes in the past few elections and his 2022 run for a legislative seat would likely have been illegal and he would have to be removed from the 2024 ballot.
The board had to act quickly so ballots could be printed before the primary. But it had no definitive answer on the central question. Just Gibson’s word.
Craig Schauer, the attorney representing state and local Republicans, tried to plant as much doubt as possible about the value of that word. He assailed Gibson’s credibility, asking question after question in prosecutor-like fashion.
Holding the microphone to his cellphone positioned on the room divider, Schauer played a snippet from Gibson’s podcast.
In the clip, Gibson talked about the date of the first county elections board hearing, showing that he knew when it was. But he had previously said he wasn’t notified. Gibson objected, claiming both copyright protection and suggesting that the clip could have been spliced together to smear him.
Schauer then pointed out that Gibson had not indicated on a filing form that he had been previously convicted of felonies, an error that could itself be potential grounds for a felony charge.
Gibson said he had previously disclosed his felonies to the state Board of Elections and didn’t know he had to do it again.
The board went through the evidence it had: on the key point, still just Gibson’s testimony. To their knowledge, there was no other vetting through government systems for people convicted out of state.
“We’re not here to decide whether Mr. Gibson is a nice guy,” Thurman Hampton, one of the three Democratic members of the board, reminded his colleagues. He said he was inclined to give Gibson the benefit of the doubt, based on how much time had elapsed since he was incarcerated. Tom Schoolfield, a Republican board member, emphasized that Gibson needed to prove he was eligible and had failed to do so.
In the end, it was a party-line vote. Three Democrats voted to dismiss the challenge, and two Republicans voted to sustain it.
Gibson left the room long before the vote. He didn’t respond to interview requests.
Republicans have filed an appeal to the state board. A meeting is set for Tuesday afternoon.
Wiley, the House Republicans’ caucus director, whose responsibilities include recruiting and vetting candidates, said the ordeal has kept him up at night. His research to bolster the case, horror at the Nazi propaganda he reviewed, and concern for the party’s reputation all cost him that sleep, he said.
Though he’s eager to present the case again—with more information in hand, he hopes—he anticipates that the state Board of Elections’ decision will echo the county board’s, with a party-line split. He figures Democrats, who hold the majority on the state board too, see an advantage to keeping an extreme or easy-to-condemn candidate on the ballot.
If that’s the case, “then we’ll just beat him in the primary for being a convicted felon and a Nazi,” Wiley said.
Diane Parnell, the county GOP chair who filed the candidate challenge, said she was motivated to “look after the voter in Rockingham County and make sure that the person who is on the ballot is trustworthy and worthy of representing us.” She batted away Gibson’s argument to the state board that Republicans targeted him because he opposes casinos, a priority of the senate president pro tem, who is also from the area.
It’s not the first time the North Carolina GOP has had to deal with the embarrassment of a neo-Nazi running for office on their ticket.
Harold Covington, a voluble white power promoter, planner of an event called “Hitler fest,” and leader of the National Socialist Party of America, ran for a legislative seat in 1979 and the following year, for attorney general.
To the dismay of the GOP establishment, and despite the party chairman’s disavowal, Covington garnered 43 percent of the primary votes in that race, beating the party’s handpicked candidate, a former U.S. attorney, in 45 of the state’s 100 counties.
Then-state Republican chairman Jackson F. Lee told The Washington Post that Covington may have benefited from “an ornery ‘against-the-establishment’ sentiment” and “maybe 5 percent” of Covington’s vote reflected racism. More likely, Lee said, voters were confused: “There was word going around that a Nazi was running, and Snyder sounded more German than Covington.”
“Either way, Republicans don’t come out of this looking too hot,” Lee told the Associated Press. “There are 56,000 voters in this state who are either Nazis or fools.”
Covington, ever eager for publicity, explained it this way: “There are many closet Nazis in the Republican Party.”
The editorial board of one newspaper, The Sentinel in Winston-Salem, described the election results as an existential threat to the state GOP. “If North Carolina Republicans hope to maintain a credible, respectable standing, the party leaders must begin by making an earnest effort to fathom and understand the almost nihilistic malaise that would prompt even a handful of nominal Republicans to vote for a Harold Covington.” The board called the GOP “a party that does not know its members.”
In 2018, amidst an arms race between the parties to put forward a candidate in every legislative district, Republicans again disavowed a racist candidate: Russell Walker, who ran for a seat representing Scotland and Hoke counties in southeastern North Carolina.
A website he was tied to said God was a white supremacist and Jews are descended from Satan, The News & Observer reported. Wiley said he overheard Walker use the N-word at a training event.
Like Covington, Walker beat out the party-backed candidate in the primary, perhaps for reasons having to do with his opponent’s name: John Imbaratto. Wiley’s interpretation of why Walker won was that neither candidate was well known and Imbarratto was more difficult to pronounce.
Party leaders pressured Walker to resign and he refused, so they disavowed him, Wiley said. He went on to lose in the general election to the incumbent, Garland Pierce, who still represents that district.
If the state elections board does permit Gibson to stay in the primary for the Rockingham County House seat, he will face incumbent Reece Pyrtle, who previously served as a county commissioner and Eden police chief.
If he wins the primary, by anti-establishment sentiment, name advantage, or something else, Gibson might soon be able to call himself a state representative. No Democrat filed to run.
Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.