Karen Brinson-Bell

Executive Director, North Carolina Board of Elections 

Karen Brinson Bell became executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections on June 1, 2019.

As the state’s chief elections official, she leads about 65 full-time employees at the state agency, which is charged with administering elections and overseeing the 100 county boards of elections, as well as campaign finance compliance. North Carolina has more than 7 million registered voters and is the 9th most populous state in the country.

In her time as Executive Director, Karen has overseen more than 10 elections, including the 2020 Presidential election, which is the largest election in North Carolina’s history and was held during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other significant elections during her tenure include two special congressional elections impacted by Hurricane Dorian (September 2019), North Carolina’s first Super Tuesday primary on March 3, 2020, and a Congressional second primary during the COVID-19 pandemic. These elections have been coordinated efforts with N.C. Department of Public Safety, N.C. Department of Information Technology, N.C. National Guard, and other federal, state, and local partners. In the fall of 2019, these agencies jointly launched the #YourVoteCountsNC campaign to inform voters about election security and other efforts to safeguard elections.

Karen has spent most of her career in elections administration. From March 2011 to March 2015, she served as director for the Transylvania County (N.C.) Board of Elections. Prior to that, she worked for five years as a district elections technician for the State Board of Elections, where she supported 12 county boards in western N.C. in almost all facets of elections.

Before her appointment as executive director, Karen was deputy director of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. In that role, she assisted elections administrators on a national level, providing expert testimony and educational tools for conducting elections using that method.