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Gov. Cooper Makes County Election Board Chairpersons Picks

Ophelia Wright at her swearing in ceremony on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Photo by Wally White, courtesy of Ophelia Wright.

Gov. Roy Cooper has made his picks for who will lead the county boards of elections in the state. 

He reappointed Ophelia Wright as chairwoman of Rockingham County's elections board. Wright has only been chair since the spring, when she replaced the retired former chairman Royce Richardson.

Wright is a Democrat from Reidsville and former schoolteacher. She's the first Black person to hold the Rockingham post.

Also getting reappointed is Democrat Jim Kimel in Guilford County. He's held the post since 2019 and served multiple terms as the county's former elected district attorney.

A full list of appointments is here.

A 2018 law made major changes to the makeup of boards at the county level, giving the governor the authority to appoint the chairpersons.

They had previously been chosen by the members of the respective county boards.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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