US Senate candidate disqualified

Unfortunately, it wasn’t Mike Whatley.  

We told you earlier about Margot Dupre — a registered voter in Florida who has run for federal office in Colorado AND Idaho since 2020.  She last voted in Florida in April 2025.  She has filed in 2026 to run as a Republican for US Senate in North Carolina.

Yesterday, the NC state board of elections held a hearing on her case that had been continued from late January:

The North Carolina Board of Elections axed Margot Dupre’s candidacy in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, with a majority determining after a three-hour hearing that she is not a properly registered voter or a qualified primary candidate in North Carolina.

The vote against Dupre was 3-1. Board Chairman Francis De Luca was absent.

Dupre said after the hearing that she would appeal, but would not take questions from reporters. The state Court of Appeals would consider the case next. 

Dupre is one of seven Republicans on the primary ballot, though she is not one of the better-known candidates.

Primary ballots have been printed and absentee ballots have been mailed. As it stands now, if she wins the primary, the win will be vacated and the Republican Party will choose a replacement. 

Board Vice-Chairman Stacy “Four” Eggers IV told Dupre that she could still run in the general election as a write-in or unaffiliated candidate. […]

Soooooo – she’s NOT a “qualified candidate” but is A-OK to run as a “write-in or unaffiliated candidate”?  How does that work?

MORE:

[…] The hearing was postponed from last week to give Dupre time to find a lawyer. She did not have one Wednesday, so she represented herself. 

Fayetteville resident Jerry Reinoehl, a Republican, brought the challenge. He has for years been scouring voter rolls and found that Dupre registered using the address of a UPS store in Charlotte. She also used the UPS address when she filed as a Senate candidate. She did not provide a residential address.  

Reinodehl contended that Dupre is a Florida resident who is registered to vote there. He offered Florida voter registration records as evidence. 

“She’s still registered as an active voter in the state of Florida. You can’t be registered in more than one jurisdiction,” he said. 

Reinoehl said it was hard to challenge a fellow Republican, but he felt obligated to speak up.  “I saw something and said something,” he said. 

Dupre told the board she lived in her “glamper,” or luxury camper, while campaigning through the state. She slept in hotels when cold weather set in, and is now in an AirBnB in Winston-Salem. She offered hotel receipts as evidence. Her camper is now parked at a Florida residence she co-owns. 

She based her defense on a provision of the voter registration law that says a person’s residence does not need to be associated with real property, and a residence can be considered the place where the person sleeps.

“Residence shall be broadly construed to provide all persons with the opportunity to register and to vote, including stating a mailing address different from residence address,” the law says. 

Dupre said she visited North Carolina frequently since 2007 and decided to move to the state in 2024, resolving to build a home on the French Broad River after she and her husband visited Biltmore in Asheville. The land she was considering purchasing was washed away in Hurricane Helene, she said. 

“Charlotte is the area I return to while traveling through my state,” she said. “I own real estate and businesses in several states. I chose to make North Carolina my home.” 

Dupre said she doesn’t have a North Carolina license because the wait for a DMV appointment is more than a year. She told the board she has not scheduled an appointment. 

Dupre said she keeps things valuable to her in Winston-Salem, except for her horses, which are in Florida. 

Eggers, who ran the hearing, said it was significant that Dupre parked the camper at the Florida address and kept her horses there. 

“As one of our presenters at a conference once said, ‘It’s important to look where your animals are, and where your animals are, there is your heart.’”

Jeff Carmon, a Democratic board member, said the decision was difficult, but noted that Dupre said she wanted to live in the mountains, yet registered in Charlotte. 

Democrat Siobhan Millen was the sole vote in Dupre’s favor. The law offers a fail-safe for people who don’t have a fixed residence, she said. 

“It’s not fair to say they are not voting residents because they are nomadic,” Millen said. […]

This sounds like these anti-ICE, Antifa, NoKings nut-jobs could park their campers all along the road shoulders in bright-red Moore County, register to vote here, and turn us BLUE. 

States have laws about changing over your driver license and / or license tags.  Typically, you get a three-month grace period (after moving in) to get it done.  I know that’s how Virginia did it when I worked in the DC area many moons ago. (Military folks temporarily stationed in a state can maintain their residency in another state with no problem.) 

This was not Margot’s first “rodeo.” This woman had been involved with elections before.

Also, Dave Boliek‘s team deserves a yuuuuuuuuuuge amount of blame for this Charlie Foxtrot. I can see missing her voter registration with the PO Box address on it.  THAT is a needle-in-a-haystack.  But candidacy filings are a much smaller stack to pore through.

(There is still the matter of FIVE active voter registrations for little Iryna’s murderer.)

Reinoehl filed his complaint about Dupre on January 8.  Absentee ballots started being mailed out on January 12. And we’re just now resolving this on February 4.  Now, we have a bunch of people with absentee ballots that include Margot Dupre’s name.  Will Dupre’s name be edited out of the March ballots?  What’s being done to alert the people who currently have ballots about Dupre’s disqualification? 

Some people may dismiss this as too much worry about a candidate who had no prayer to start with.  Crowding up primary fields with names is an old political dirty trick.  It confuses low-information voters.

A Mike Whatley-Don Brown primary would have required 50%+ to win.  That honestly would have been a challenge for Whatley to overcome. His buddy Thom Tillis never could get 50 percent.  Adding five more names to the list of candidates shrinks the required victory margin from 50% down to 30% — a much more workable, manageable goal for Whatley.