Opinion
Tombstone, Arizona – The candidate list for the 2026 NRA Board of Directors election has been released, and people are already asking me for recommendations, even though voting doesn’t start until early next year.
I’m not ready to offer recommendations, but I do want to encourage everyone interested to start looking at the candidates and deciding who they want to support. That’s what I’ll be doing for the next couple of months, and I’ll try to provide additional resources and information along the way. Even if you’re not a Voting Member, it’s worth your time to do some research and pick your favorites so you can help guide and encourage your friends who are Voting Members (only NRA members with at least 5 consecutive years of membership, and those who are Life Members are eligible to vote).
In recent years, only about 3% of eligible NRA voters have bothered to return their ballots. We need to change that going forward, and I believe more information about the candidates is the key to accomplishing that.
A total of 38 candidates have been nominated to fill twenty-five 3-year seats and at least two additional vacated seats. There might be one or two additional seats opened up between now and the election due to deaths or resignations, but it’s important to remember that you don’t have to cast a ballot for every open seat. Those who have followed my writing for the past 20+ years know that I usually advise “Bullet Voting” for only one or two candidates. That advice was due to the insurgent nature of the candidates I supported. I wasn’t happy with the Board or the leadership, and there were usually only a couple of candidates willing to really challenge the status quo. That’s all changed over the past couple of years. We now have a Board that’s engaged, with a majority that’s willing to stand up for the membership, so it’s more of a situation of a few candidates I don’t want to see elected, out of a large pool of well-qualified nominees.
That’s a very positive development.
There were two major changes ordered by the court in the nomination process this year:
- The Nominating Committee was required to nominate at least 20 “new” candidates who have not previously served on the NRA Board, or have only served one full term or less since 2022, and
- The petition process for nomination was ordered to be opened up to online signature gathering, making that process much easier than it’s been in recent years.
Historically, for at least the past 20 years, the Nominating Committee has automatically renominated every incumbent, unless the incumbent had done something to anger the powers that be, then nominated an additional 3 or 4 “new” candidates (usually folks who were serving on one or more Board committees, while not yet members of the Board – sort of a “farm team” approach). Rarely did we ever have more than one or two insurgent candidates able to collect enough signatures to be placed on the ballot by petition. This meant that the end result was a ballot with 23 to 25 incumbents, 3 or 4 “new” candidates nominated by the Nominating Committee, and 1 or 2 candidates nominated by petition, adding up to about 30 candidates to fill 25 to 27 seats.
This year, the Nominating Committee nominated about a dozen incumbents, including several who are just completing their first term, along with about 18 new candidates. On top of that, we have 8 additional petition candidates, including 3 incumbents that were not renominated by the Nominating Committee, for a total of 38 candidates to fill 25 3-year seats plus at least 2 shorter term “replacement” seats to fill vacancies.
I think the Nominating Committee unquestionably gave some consideration to things like incumbents’ positions on, and culpability in, the scandals of the LaPierre era, as well as the legal debacles that followed.
It is unprecedented that the Nominating Committee would pass over a past NRA President for renomination, but they did it this year when they chose not to renominate Charles Cotton.
I’m not sure whether Mr. Cotton even requested to be considered. He was Chair of the Audit Committee and served on the Finance Committee for most of the past 20+ years, along with Director David Coy, who served as Chair of Finance and Vice-Chair of Audit. I have several times singled these two out as the most culpable among the Board members, for holding those positions of influence all those years and never challenging LaPierre’s activities or those of his close allies among the staff, vendors, and contractors, not properly handling whistleblower complaints, and supporting the disastrous Brewer legal strategy. The judge in the New York trial apparently agreed, as he forbid the appointment of either of them, as members of the Audit Committee during “the troubles,” from serving on the Audit Committee going forward.
I saw no indication that Mr. Cotton tried to get on the ballot this cycle, even though his term was expiring, and Mr. Coy had another year to serve, as he was just reelected in 2024, but he submitted his resignation from the Board last week.
That’s all good news as far as I’m concerned, but there are troubling complications.
At the same time that the NRA was sued by New York, the NRA Foundation was sued by the AG of Washington, DC. While the NY case received a lot of attention, the DC case was much lower profile.
That case was eventually settled with agreements, in part, to create additional separation between the NRA and the Foundation, giving the NRA Foundation more independence from the NRA Board. When Tom King was not reelected to the Board this year, that created an awkward situation, as Mr. King, who has always been close to and supportive of LaPierre, is President of the Foundation Board of Trustees. Over the course of the last several months, Mr. King has brought both Cotton and Coy onto the Foundation Board, and the reason for Mr. Coy’s resignation from the NRA Board is that he was elected Treasurer of the Foundation.
I need to do additional research on all of this, but at first blush, it appears that the LaPierre hold-out faction of the NRA Board has executed something of a coup within the NRA Foundation.
At the very least, all of this is unsettling. I’ll be digging deeper and will report what I find.
For now, please review the attached list of nominees, paying special attention to those who might live in your area. If you find anything of particular interest, please let me know. I’ll be doing the same, and am working on a plan to try to get more information about the candidates more readily available to our members.
In the big picture, I think the NRA has made massive strides in the right direction, and I think the Nominating Committee has done an excellent job. I’m confident that, regardless of who is elected, next year’s Board will be an improvement over this year’s, which was significantly better than the year before. Things are getting better.
Nominating Committee & Petition Nominees NRA Board Of Directors 2026 Election
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a dedicated political activist and the director of The Firearms Coalition, following in the footsteps of his father, Neal Knox. In 2024, Jeff was elected to the NRA Board of Directors, underscoring his lifelong commitment to protecting the Second Amendment. The Knox family has played a pivotal role in the ongoing struggle for gun rights, a legacy documented in the book Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War, authored by Jeff’s brother, Chris Knox.
Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, The Firearms Coalition is a network of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs, and civil rights organizations. The Coalition supports grassroots efforts by providing education, analysis of current issues, and a historical perspective on the gun rights movement. For more information, visit www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
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