State-hopping frequent candidate subject of NC state elections inquiry
Every election seems to have a few candidates on the ballot who make you scratch your head and ask: “Who? Why?”
Some filing fees get pretty big — depending on the race. So, it is a financial commitment to file for office. Thousands of dollars out of your pocket to finish dead last — fifth out of five on a primary. ballot.
Margo Patrice Dupre — one of the candidates on North Carolina’s GOP primary ballot for US Senate — appears to be another one of these folks with money to burn. But she has an interesting story behind her.
Dupre appears to have run for the US Senate in Colorado in 2020.
In 2024, she appears to have run for Congress in the state of Idaho.
Florida election records appear to indicate that she has an active Florida voter registration and last voted in that state in April 2025.
In December 2025, she filed to run for the US Senate in North Carolina.
That brings us to an election complaint filed regarding the Dupre US Senate candidacy with the state board of elections that is slated to be heard this week.
Elections law does not allow one to register to vote with a PO Box. You have to identify where you actually lay your head at night. Homeless (or transient) people can register by simply IDing where they most regularly stay.
Surely, the whole thing with voting in Florida in April and then filing for Senate in North Carolina eight months later will become an issue in the state hearing.
This could end up throwing quite a monkey wrench into North Carolina’s primary elections. There are specific requirements in law about the schedule for issuing ballots.
Absentee ballots started getting mailed out on January 12. If Dupre is found to have improperly / unlawfully filed for office in North Carolina, the ballots will have to be corrected somehow.
Another thing to think about —- candidate field packing is an old-as-the-hills dirty trick. A primary starts off as a two-person race. And then folks start showing up that no one has ever heard of. Lots of times it’s unknowns who have similar names to one of the initial two candidates.
Grow the field, dilute the vote, and take a race that once required 50 percent of the vote to win down to needing only 30 percent.
Sometimes tricksters have fun by adding candidates to a field who have similar names. File a guy named Don Jones to run against Ron Jones. Just enough similarity to fool low-information / elderly voters.
Here in Moore County, we recently had Steve Adams run against Tom Adams. It made it tough to simply say Vote Adams or print campaign materials saying that. Which Adams? (By the way, Tom won.)
A US Senate primary field including only Mike Whatley vs. Don Brown would have made things much harder for Whatley. He would have needed 50 percent. Now — thanks to Dupre, Michele Morrow, and some others — Whatley now only needs 30 percent.
