Several days a week, aspiring election candidate Zach Traylor and his campaign team head out into Fayetteville to knock on doors and to ask people for their signatures.
They are collecting signatures because Traylor wants to serve in the North Carolina House of Representatives, in central and eastern Fayetteville’s House Dist. 44. But state law says Traylor's name won’t appear on the ballot in November unless he can get at least 2,170 registered voters from Dist. 44 to sign a petition for him.
“We need 2,170 by March 5 at noon, and our goal is to reach 5,000,” he said.
Meanwhile, the other four people vying for House Dist. 44 are exempt from conducting petition drives to get on the ballot. These are Democratic incumbent Charles Smith, Republican Freddie de la Cruz, and Libertarians Angel Yaklin and Christina Aragues. Yaklin and Aragues face each other in North Carolina’s March 5 primary elections.
Why don’t these four have to collect signatures to run for office as Traylor does? Because Smith, de La Cruz, Yaklin and Aragues all belong to one of North Carolina’s five government-approved political parties.
And Traylor doesn’t.
The Democrats and Republicans who enacted North Carolina election laws decided that potential candidates like Traylor, who choose to be unaffiliated or “independent” voters, aren’t allowed to run for an office that the government designates as a partisan seat unless they collect the appropriate number of signatures from voters in their districts.
Meanwhile, voters who join one of the government-approved political parties don’t have to collect signatures if they want to run for a partisan office.
As of now, the state has approved five political parties: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party and the No Labels organization.
The petition requirement remains on the books even though there are more unaffiliated voters (2.74 million, or 36.75% as of Jan. 27) in North Carolina than the Democrats (2.42 million, 32.44%) or Republicans (2.24 million, 30.02%).
For House Dist. 44, that’s 2,170 signatures — 4% of the total number of registered voters that were in Dist. 44 as of Jan. 1.
If the election is for an office that the government has decreed to be nonpartisan, such as the Fayetteville City Council or Cumberland County Board of Education, unaffiliated candidates do not have to collect signatures to run.
For example, Fayetteville City Councilman Deno Hondros does not belong to a political party and is not required to collect signatures to be an eligible candidate.
Since 2011, the legislature’s Republican majority has been converting local elections for school board from nonpartisan races to partisan. Of the over 500 municipalities in the state, five cities and towns have partisan elections.
Traylor is one of three independent voters in Cumberland County this year who notified the county Board of Elections they wanted to be candidates in the 2024 election cycle. The other two are Garrett Gwin of Hope Mills, who had planned to run for N.C. House Dist. 45, and Keith Rhodia of Fayetteville, who was planning to run in Dist. 2 for the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners.
Gwin and Rhodia told CityView they have suspended their campaign efforts. Gwin said he is caring for a sick family member. Rhodia said he is busy running his family’s transportation company and won’t be able to devote the time required to do a good job as a commissioner.
The county Board of Elections office said Gwin would have needed 2,164 signatures to run for House Dist. 45, where incumbent Democrat Frances Jackson is otherwise unopposed for reelection.
Rhodia would have needed 5,618 signatures for County Commission Dist. 2. (Four Democrats and eight Republicans have filed for the three seats on County Commission Dist. 2, the office said.)
The last time an independent candidate collected signatures to run for a Cumberland County office was 2018, the county Board of Elections said.
That year, Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons, who became unaffiliated after leaving the Democratic Party in 2016, had a petition drive to get on the ballot. At the time, he told The Fayetteville Observer he needed about 2,100 signatures and collected at least 5,000.
However, Ammons ended up not needing the signatures. The Republican-controlled legislature canceled partisan primaries for the 2018 judicial elections. With no partisan primaries, unaffiliated candidates were allowed on the ballot without collecting signatures.
Who is Zach Traylor, and why is he independent?
Traylor, 24, said he grew up in a military family, and he is an Army veteran who moved to Fayetteville in 2020 when he was a soldier stationed at Fort Liberty.
After medically leaving the service last year with the rank of specialist, Traylor said, he opened a dog boarding business with the Rover service.
Traylor registered to vote on Sept. 20 with the No Labels party, according to the county elections office and election records, then switched on Sept. 27 to unaffiliated when he early-voted for the Oct. 10 Fayetteville City Council nonpartisan primary election.
“Growing up I was — especially as a little kid — I was a Republican. Which, I didn’t know what those terms meant,” he said.
“I then moved to Miami and registered myself as a Democrat when I hit 18,” he said.
Though he’s unaffiliated, Traylor prefers No Labels, he said. The No Labels organization became a government-recognized political party in North Carolina in August 2023. The organization says it isn’t a political party, but it plans to advance “a Unity ticket to run for president if the two major parties select candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t want to vote for in 2024.”
“They have the best of both worlds,” Traylor said. “They have the care and the compassion of the Democrats, while the financial fortitude of the Republicans.”
If Traylor had remained registered as No Labels, state law would have prohibited him from running as a No Labels candidate because the deadline to register with a party and run for office as a member of that party in the 2024 elections was Sept. 16 — 90 days before the Dec. 15 filing deadline.
Elsewhere in North Carolina, at least 16 other unaffiliated candidates gave notice that they are collecting signatures to run in partisan races, according to the state Board of Elections. They want to run for the legislature, for District Court judge, for Congress, and for president.
Some need several thousand signatures, others need more. Those running for president need 83,188.
Unaffiliated candidates shouldn’t have to hold petition drives to get on the ballot, Traylor said.
“I 100% believe that independent candidates, unaffiliated candidates, those who don’t fit into the standard party structure should still be given a voice,” he said.
Some might say, Traylor said, a more open ballot would draw a flood of candidates. “My caveat is or I guess my rebuttal is that hasn’t happened even with the current, you know, we don’t even have 50 people out here trying to collect signatures and such.”
Keith Rhodia, who had planned to run for the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners as an unaffiliated candidate, also wants the law to change.
If Rhodia had not suspended his campaign, he would have been seeking 5,618 signatures for his petition to get on the ballot.
“I do not support having to get 4,000 to 5,000 wet signatures to petition,” he said. “As long as a person is of sound mind, and eligible or qualified to be an elected official, I think that regardless of their affiliation or unaffiliation, I think one signature, of their own, should suffice.”
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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