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Accomplished Alumni: Karen Brinson Bell

Executive Director of North Carolina State Board of Elections returns to alma mater for National Voter Registration Day

By UNC Asheville

October 5^th, 2023

As young as four years old, UNC Asheville alumna Karen Brinson Bell ‘96 was instilled with the importance of civic duty.

Her father was mayor, then town manager and very active in the campaigns of her small hometown. She would tag along to campaign events, to put out yard signs, just to spend time with her dad. With exposure to the electoral environment came a thorough understanding of the importance of her right to vote.

“It was your civic responsibility. I remember going and voting with my parents or my grandparents and having family members be poll workers,” Bell said. “It was as ingrained in our family and how I was raised as religion is for some peoples’ family. It meant I was always very attentive, always raising my hand, always willing to do the homework for civics class. I was that kid.”

Now, she is the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections and holds the responsibility of making sure every North Carolinian who can, has the opportunity to vote.

“Our work is to not disenfranchise anyone, assuring that every eligible voter is able to exercise their right to vote,” Bell said. “In those policy considerations, we have to think about not just the seven-plus million voters but of that singular voter because that’s the heart of my job.”

Karen Brinson Bell (right), executive director of NC State Board of Elections, and Ashley Moraguez (left), associate professor of political science.

Humanities Builds Foundation for Civic Engagement

The Board of Elections, a state agency charged with control of elections and voting procedure, performs a wide range of roles from voter registration to training poll workers, and candidate filing to ballot proofing. It involves disseminating accurate information and assistance with absentee ballots, which directly concern college students.

“They are a subset of the population we try to engage with as much as possible. It's fantastic when you see faculty willing to engage with us or with their county board of elections so there is good information,” Bell said.

Students can face particular difficulty when trying to vote, Bell said. They may not have a photo ID, may have trouble receiving their absentee ballot to a campus address, or may just not have the stamps needed to mail the ballot. They are challenged with deciding between voting in their hometown or their college town.

Despite the challenges, UNC Asheville has consistently high student voter turnout, even receiving a Platinum Medal in the 2021 ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, for voter turnout rates of 80 to 89 percent in the 2020 Presidential Election.

Bell cites the University’s curriculum for inspiring students to practice their civic rights.

“When you have a humanities program, when you have ethics classes, every student in every discipline is being taught that big picture aspect they have in what they do and the effect it has on the world,” Bell said. “When that is always front and center in the curriculum here and in the community’s engagement with the campus, that changes the dynamic."

She paraphrases her former political science professor, Dwight Mullen, who taught at UNC Asheville from 1984-2018:

“The importance of a liberal arts degree is that it teaches you critical thinking. While there may be other degrees that will give you skills that will help you immediately out of college to land a job and it might be harder for a liberal arts student, over the course of time that ability to critically think will carry you far.”

Bell continues, “I won't say I'm the poster child in critical thinking, but I do know that my degree here gave me that foundation. Everything that I took – be it a humanities class, a news writing class, a political science class – every professor, no matter the discipline, challenged you to think critically. It makes the difference; I see it in the work that I have to do."

Karen Brinson Bell and Ashley Moraguez speak to students about registering to vote.

Trend-seeking Undergraduate Research Still Relevant Today

Alongside humanities in the bedrock of her educational experience that prepared her for her current work was her undergraduate research, which she completed under Bill Sabo, former professor of political science.

Bell said Sabo acted as a mentor in the truest sense — challenging, yet encouraging, believing her capable of graduate-level work when she didn’t know it herself.

With Sabo’s guidance, she landed on examining the rise in Republican voting in North Carolina, examining election results for President, Congress Governor and State Senate between 1966 and 1994. In an era before public computerized voting records databases, she had to contact all 100 county elections offices in the state to gather data for her statistical analysis.

“If I sat down with Sabo now, we could pick up my research and continue to analyze the voting trends,” Bell said.

After graduating, Bell went on to hold several positions related to elections, including director of elections for Transylvania County, which prepared her well to tackle the entire state.

“I'm the fourth state elections director since the position existed, but I'm the only one who had been a county elections director. That alone gives me a different perspective,” Bell said. “Transylanvia was one of the first counties to have more unaffiliated voters than either Democrat or Republican, and that’s our state now. Also being in a smaller county meant that I had to be more hands on. I don’t have to ask someone how voting equipment works. I've touched it, I've tested it, I've hauled it.”

Karen Brinson Bell and her mentor Bill Sabo, former professor of political science.

Orchestrating North Carolina’s Largest Election, in Midst of the Pandemic

This level of experience was never as important as it was going into the 2020 election. At the height of the pandemic, Bell administered the election with the largest turnout in modern history of the state, at 75 percent.

“Most ballots ever cast at 5.5 million, most registered voters our state had ever had, more than 7.3 million. We did all of this in a pandemic. We had to think about how to not only securely carry out voting, as we would always do, we had to think about how to safely carry out voting from a public health standpoint,” Bell said. “Because we had no playbook and we had to make decisions that, I don't mean it dramatically, sometimes felt like life or death.”

Despite that career-making success, Bell said she still faced much criticism and had to develop “teflon skin.”

“I've encouraged my colleagues to hold onto those moments that inspire you,” Bell said. “When you have your worst day, or someone says something horrible about you, and it hurts, to draw on that moment.”

For her, one of those moments came when a former prisoner walked into her office and requested a voter registration form. While imprisoned for a felony, he had not been able to vote, but he had served his time and was eligible once more.

After a few moments of struggling in silence, he spoke up, told her that he couldn’t read well enough to complete the form and needed help.

“To have someone trust me — who in no way looked like them, they'd never met me before — for them to say, she's an election official, I'm going to trust that she's going to help me fill out this form for something that’s that valuable to him has never been lost on me,” Bell said. “I don't remember how long it took but we got every part of that form filled out.”

Experiential, Multi-Disciplinary Education is Key

Bell said one-on-one moments like that are like something beyond adrenaline — it’s your purpose for moving forward. She encourages students who want to work in elections to get in on that ground-level, real-world experience. Volunteer with community organizations, work as a poll worker, take internships and mentor opportunities as much as you can.

Bells’ work often involves management, human resources, IT and data science, and mass communication. Learning to see things from all angles helps inform her decisions.

“Drink in some of these things that you are learning from other disciplines, because it does expand your critical thinking skills, it does expand your knowledge base. I can remember in a humanities class, an environmental piece by Wilma Dykeman really had nothing to do with anything that I was studying but it really raised the question, what does a paper mill do to a community economically, environmentally, culturally? You don't have those discussions everywhere, but you have them at UNC Asheville.”

"You don’t have those discussions everywhere, but you have them at UNC Asheville.”

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