5 Reasons to Consider Joe Teague Jr. for Wake County Clerk of Superior Court
Most Wake County voters will reach this line on the ballot and find two names they do not know. The state can help with some of that. Its online voter guide covers the appellate courts and explains who is running for them. It does not cover this race. Clerk of Superior Court is elected county by county so the guide skips it and voters comparing the Wake County Clerk of Superior Court candidates are largely on their own.
Court races near the bottom of the ballot tend to be low-information contests, and most people admit they are guessing by the time they reach them. That leaves a fair question. What should anyone actually look for in a clerk?
The office is not glamorous and it is not ceremonial. The clerk decides probate matters and oversees the administration of estates. The clerk hears guardianship cases and foreclosure proceedings. The clerk keeps the county's court records and runs the counter where the public meets the court system. Judged against that job description, here is the case for Joe Teague Jr.
1. The work is process and process is his trade
Teague is a licensed professional engineer. He also holds an MBA. Neither credential is a law degree and he has never pretended otherwise.
What an engineer does for a living is take a system apart and find the step that keeps failing. Estates get delayed. Filings sit. People come back a third time with the same paperwork. Those are process failures before they are legal ones, and a courthouse is full of them.
Teague argues that the clerk's office is mostly a process problem in a judicial building. Fix the process and a good deal of the friction disappears on its own.
2. Court records need someone who owns them
Ask Teague what concerns him most and the answer comes back to records. Files, motions logged at the counter, the audio and video the courtrooms are supposed to capture.
He points at recording equipment as the case in point. Gear stops working. It stays broken. The person who finds out is whoever shows up asking for a record of their own hearing, and by then it is too late for them.
None of this is abstract. A missing recording is a missing appeal. A file nobody can locate is an estate that stalls while a family waits. Infrastructure fails quietly when nobody is responsible for it, and Teague wants the technology side of the office treated as a management job rather than something the budget handles once a year.
3. He wants a counter that points people somewhere
Clerks cannot give legal advice. That rule exists for good reason and Teague does not want it loosened.
He draws a line, though, between declining to practice law and declining to be useful. Naming the right form is not legal advice. Pointing at the right office is not legal advice. Neither is telling someone where else they might look.
Teague has watched people arrive at a clerk's window in bad shape, ask what to do next, and be told that nobody there can help. He has also noticed how much of the physical setup says stay back, down to the glass between the public and the staff. The people at that window are usually having one of the worst weeks of their lives. He thinks the office should be built around that fact.
4. He has been watching these courts for a very long time
Teague has followed North Carolina's courts as a private citizen for decades. Not as a step in a career. He sits in on cases because he finds the machinery interesting, and he has done it at every level up to the state Supreme Court.
That is an unusual reason to want a job. It is also a hard one to fake. A candidate who has spent years in the gallery of a courtroom he had no professional reason to be in has already answered the question of whether he wants this for the right reasons.
5. Voters get to decide what kind of clerk they want
Wake County's recent clerks have been attorneys. That is a legitimate background for the office and nobody serious argues otherwise.
It is not the only one. The ballot this year offers a genuine alternative, and the choice belongs to voters rather than to custom. A lawyer brings knowledge of the law the office administers. An engineer brings a different eye for how the office runs. Both matter in a role that is part judicial and part operational.
Teague is asking Wake County to weigh the second one seriously. Not to dismiss the first.
Before you vote
Voting is already underway. Absentee ballots went out in early September and registration closes on October 9.
Early voting opens on October 15 and runs to the end of the month. Sites close at three in the afternoon on that final Saturday, so do not leave it late. You can register and vote in the same trip at any early voting site. Election Day is November 3, and on that day you vote at your assigned precinct. The Wake County Board of Elections publishes the site list and lets you check your registration.
Plenty of people will leave this line blank. That is a choice too, and it hands the decision to whoever else turned up.