NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The New Hanover County Board of Elections is meeting in closed session on Monday night, reportedly to discuss Director DeNay Harris’ job performance. Put on administrative paid leave, the director has made email-tampering claims toward the county, with preliminary results of a third-party investigation and computer forensic review showing no evidence of manipulation.
At 10 a.m. on Monday, March 23, New Hanover County IT Chief Information Officer Sunny Hwang informed Assistant County Manager Lisa Wurtzbacher the investigation into Harris’ computer and Microsoft account found “zero evidence of unauthorized access, account delegation, or data manipulation by any party.”
READ MORE: ‘Between the offices’: Relationship between NHC election director and county manager on shaky ground
Conducted by Netrio and Titan Digital Forensics & Consulting, the investigation did not identify any inbound remote access to Harris’ device, any unauthorized connections to the device, nor any “Living Off the Land” attacks. This is when hackers use pre-installed system tools rather than malware to carry out cyber attacks.
The report notes results are preliminary since no peer review, coordination with New Hanover IT, other departments or alternate review was able to be conducted because of the short time frame. The full technical report is still inbound. The county paid $2,600 for the investigation.
Monday’s board of elections meeting, as well as the report revelation, follow several weeks of conflict among Harris, the local elections board and the New Hanover County government. Harris has claimed the county micromanaged her transition into the position two months ago — though boards of elections and county governments are statutorily separate entities. By law, the elections director is supposed to answer to the local and state board.
Harris also asserted the county and local board of elections bullied and intimidated her.
After March 4, Harris began alleging that her emails were being tampered with and even deleted; she added invoices were being reverted to unapproved status. The county IT department said it found no evidence of such claims and confiscated Harris’ work computer Thursday, March 19, for a third-party audit.
The director was put on paid administrative leave officially Thursday. She started Feb. 3 with a base salary of $115,000.
North Carolina law outlines the process for removing a director begins with a petition voted on by a majority of the local board, though the action is not required to take place in open session. Thus, it is unclear whether the board will announce it has signed the petition to process Harris’ removal at Monday night’s meeting.
The petition will then be sent to the State Board of Elections. Upon receipt, the executive director of the state board, Sam Hayes, shall forward a copy of the petition by certified mail to the county director of elections involved, meaning Harris. The county director is then given 15 days to respond with a refute or explanation.
Unless a different timeline is outlined, the executive director has 20 days to render a decision on the termination. The State Board of Elections has another 20 days to intervene before the decision is final. If the state board chooses to take up the case, the county election director may be permitted to present their side of the story before the state board.
Any one or more members of the state board can conduct a hearing and make the final determination.
Port City Daily asked the state board if the petition is public or if the state could disclose whether a petition has been received. A response was not received by press.
How did we get here?
As reported by Port City Daily and WHQR on Friday, March 20, the relationship between the board of elections, county leadership and Harris began to dramatically deteriorate on March 4.
Harris sent an email to the local and state elections boards, accusing county staff of potentially violating state laws around secured election facilities. Before Harris took over, Assistant County Manager Lisa Wurtzbacher and the county manager’s executive aide, Crystal Whittaker, were running the board of elections, and had badge access after the abrupt departure of former director Rae Hunter-Havens in October 2025. The appointments were agreed upon by the local board of election, despite the statutory separation between county government, which reports to elected county commissioners, and boards of elections reporting to the state board.
When County Manager Chris Coudriet was made aware of the complaint, his response sparked an escalating series of emails with Harris, ending with Coudriet telling her he “would be the judge on what level of county resources, to include facilities, that we now choose to extend to you.”
Despite the separation of authority between the county and local board of elections, the county provides the local board its annual budget.
Harris saw the issue as a continuation of past tension between the county and local board of elections, including a terse dust-up in 2023 over facilities access, a 2024 investigation into the elections board, paid for by the county after a vote-counting debacle, and the retirement of Hunter-Havens.
Over the next two weeks, the situation devolved further, with Harris filing a complaint with HR, alleging she was being bullied and retaliated against, and not long after stating her work email was being monitored, manipulated, and erased. She would later claim it was being done by the county in an effort to undermine her position.
Harris also made a series of allegations against county and elections leadership, generally rejected by the people involved as false or insubstantial. And, as the county’s IT attempted to access her laptop to perform a forensic review, Harris stopped coming into the office; ultimately, the county dispatched law enforcement to retrieve it.
The New Hanover County NAACP issued a statement on Monday calling for a full, independent investigation into Harris’ claims of “misconduct, retaliation, racism and sexism.”
“At the core of this issue is a troubling claim that a qualified leader, responsible for safeguarding the integrity of our democratic process, has been targeted with undermining, intimidation, and retaliation after insisting on following North Carolina election law. The NAACP finds it especially concerning that these actions seem to be part of a longstanding pattern where Black leaders and women in authority face excessive scrutiny, disrespect, and obstruction in their work,” New Hanover County Branch President LeRon Montgomery said in a press release.
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