A mis-swipe on a phone shouldn’t stop a Wilson County man from running to be the county’s next sheriff, the State Board of Elections ruled Tuesday.
The decision settles a dispute that’s been causing strife between state and county officials for more than a month.
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State elections officials voted to allow Bobby Knight to run for Wilson sheriff after his candidacy was challenged by competitors in the upcoming GOP primary. Party affiliation was at the center of the case.
Knight has been a registered Republican for years — except for about five hours on the morning of Dec. 1, 2025, when he was a Democrat. An errant tap on his phone while updating his voter registration address accidentally changed his affiliation, he said.
State law says someone must be a member of a political party for at least 90 days to run for election as a member of that party. And due to the flub, he didn’t meet that requirement, county officials determined. But the state elections board overruled the county in a 3-2 party-line vote, with the state election board’s Republican majority in favor and the Democratic minority opposed. The decision means Knight will be allowed to run in the Republican Party primary.
In 2018, the state legislature passed the 90-day party membership requirement. The intent was to stop shenanigans caused by political activists or others who might party-switch and run for office to sow chaos or help out another candidate. That law came about after allegations of Democrats meddling in that year’s race for a state Supreme Court seat.
Knight says he’s a legitimate Republican, and that his brief membership in the Democratic Party was an honest mistake.
“I’m just kind of overwhelmed with the excitement that I'm going to get to run for sheriff and affect some change in this community,” Knight told WRAL in an interview after the board voted to put him on the 2026 ballot. “So I just want to tell the people of Wilson County that I didn't give up on them. And I appreciate them not giving up on me through this fight.”
At least two of his potential opponents in the upcoming elections strongly disagree that his party-switch was an accident, however, accusing him of engaging in the sort of strategic party-switching that inspired the 2018 law.
Either way, the state law banning candidates from running without at least 90 prior days of party membership contains no exceptions for mistakes or anything else. But the state board’s Republican majority said that in this specific case, they felt comfortable letting Knight run anyway, leaving it up to local voters to make the ultimate decision.
Republican board member Bob Rucho said he believed Knight made an honest mistake and that he supports “giving the voters an opportunity to choose the people that they would like to pick.”
The head of the North Carolina Democratic Party, Anderson Clayton, criticized the elections board Wednesday for what she views as the board's Republican majority ruling that fellow Republicans don't have to follow the law.
"The State Board of Elections has an obligation to apply eligibility requirements consistently, not bend them to benefit Republican candidates," Clayton said. "... Yesterday’s selective interpretation of the law from the State Board of Elections will only further erode confidence in a body that has become increasingly political since [Republican] Auditor [Dave] Boliek assumed control."
There is precedent for election boards choosing to ignore state law when they feel it’s appropriate. That includes a 2024 decision by the Wake County Board of Elections — made at the time by the board’s then-Democratic majority — to count the ballots of three people who voted early but died before the election. Their ballots would’ve been thrown out under state law, if not for the county board’s interjection.
‘Fat-finger mistake’
Knight says his brief party switch was an accident he made while trying to update his voter registration, exhausted from a long shift in his job with the Nash County Sheriff’s Office.
He was simply trying to update his address before filing for election to make sure his registration was accurate but accidentally also changed his party registration to Democratic in the process, he said, blaming “fat finger” errors and mental fog in an interview after the vote.
“Working 12-hour shifts, I mean, you're tired, you're just kind of clicking through a lot of stuff,” Knight said. “You sit there and look at a computer screen all night, listening to a radio all night, it gets kind of — you just kind of get through it. And that's kind of what happened on the phone. … I think it's an honest mistake that people can understand as a fat-finger mistake, because we all have made them.”
Kevin Travis Raper — the other Republican running against Knight in this year’s GOP primary — doesn’t believe that story. But he added that it doesn’t matter whether it’s true: The law clearly bans people from running for election if they weren’t a member of their party for 90 days, Raper says, and because of Knight’s switches, he was a Democrat less than two weeks before ultimately filing to run for office as a Republican and therefore shouldn’t be on the ballot.
“It’s like we make up rules as we go,” Raper said. “That's why people get fed up with government and the election process in general.”
Raper said there’s testimony on the record showing that Knight had advance notice that the current Wilson County sheriff, Calvin Woodard, planned not to seek reelection this year. He believes Knight’s party-switching was related to that, and he criticized the elections board for not enforcing the rule that could’ve stopped such behavior.
“I know the meeting we just had, talking about voters and stuff, people have choices,” Raper said. “Yes, we need to have choices. More people need to get involved. But this thing is a black eye on the state's part.”
Woodard is a Democrat, and Wilson is a county that leans very narrowly in favor of Democrats in many elections. He has endorsed a Democrat, Brandon Barbrey, to replace him according to the Wilson Times newspaper.
Barbrey has also challenged Knight’s candidacy; he was represented at Tuesday’s meeting by attorney Andrew Simpson.
Simpson said that on the same morning Knight was switching his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic and then back to Republican, he was also calling fellow law enforcement officers to figure out who was going to win Woodard’s endorsement and which party that person belonged to.
Knight switched to the Democratic Party just before 6 a.m. and then asked to be re-registered as a Republican just after 11 a.m. Simpson said the intervening hours saw a flurry of activity.
“At 7:20 a.m. according to testimony from Sergeant [Steven] Creech, he got a call from Mr. Knight asking whether the sheriff was endorsing anyone,” Simpson said. “Then at 8:30 a.m. Mr. Knight called our client, Mr. Barbrey himself, and asked whether he was running as a Republican or Democrat. When he learned [Barbrey] was running as a Democrat, Mr. Knight, a few hours later, switches back to Republican.”
In all, Simpson said, the evidence showed “a clear picture of strategic maneuvering, not technological error.”
After the board voted to put Knight on the ballot, board chairman Francis De Luca acknowledged the possibility of further challenges in this case.
“I'm sure that we may hear about this one again, so we'll see,” De Luca said. “But until then, he is a candidate.”
WRAL state government Caroline Yaffa contributed reporting