Last week Jordan Green at YES! Weekly reported that GOP NC House candidate Debra Conrad was feeling pressured to raise money for the Republican House Caucus in order to get the best committee assignments. The News & Observer picked up on the story and NC Policy Watch weighed in also:

If there’s anything to Conrad’s claim, this is extremely troubling news for our state. Pay-to-play politics of the kind described by Conrad are at the root of innumerable problems that plague our state’s politics and policies.

BlueNC has acquired a House Republican Caucus document that lends some credence to the claim and may rebut the claim of Thom Tillis' communications director Jordan Shaw that: "There’s none of that type of operation."

The campaign committees of Walter Dalton and Pat McCrory were audited by the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBOE). Both campaigns had some minor discrepancies that were addressed by their committees. The Dalton campaign forfeited $200 in cash contributions made in 2011. Two $100 cash contributions were over the one time $50 limit. Had the contributions been made as $50 in cash on consecutive days they would have been legal. The McCrory campaign forfeited $5,000 in excess contributions made in 2012 because they occurred between the 2008 general election and the 2012 primary. $1,000 excess came from Ira Jackson III of Raleigh. $4,000 came from Wendell Murphy of Rose Hill. Had the contributions been made by a spouse who had not already exceeded the $4,000 limit per election cycle they would have been legal.

If the Voter Integrity Project were a registered voter its vote could be successfully challenged on the basis that it uses forms of address not recognized as valid by the US Postal Service, which can cause mail to be returned to senders as “Undeliverable”. This anomaly serves to highlight the dangers to voter access posed by various gratuitously strict matching requirements that have been proposed for forms of identity verification for in-person voting.

The right wing Voter Integrity Project, which has been challenging voter registrations in NC, uses an address form that gives the illusion of a physical address but which is actually a Private Mail Box (PMB) at a Raleigh UPS Store.

An effort by Republicans to register voters with paid workers is underway in North Carolina and across the nation. In the past month various ads have appeared on Craigslist, Facebook and other online job listings offering amounts from $11 to $13 per hour (and in some cases internship credit) to help Republicans and Mitt Romney win in North Carolina in November by identifying conservatives and registering them as voters. The operation is linked to an Arizona company with a history of fraud allegations including the destruction of Democratic registration cards.