Julie Brill, an assistant attorney general from Vermont, is replacing newly-elected state Sen. Josh Stein as the state's top consumer watchdog.

Attorney General Roy Cooper has hired Brill to be the head of his Consumer Protection Division. She has been working in the Vermont Attorney General's Consumer Protection and Antitrust divisions since October 1991, Dan Kane reports.

Jennifer Canada, a spokeswoman for Cooper, said that Brill was instrumental in launching the Vermont office's litigation, legislative and regulatory strategies in a wide variety of consumer and business matters. They include privacy, credit reporting, financial services, tobacco, food, drugs and other health-related industries.

"Consumers are facing new threats from fraud and bad deals in the struggling economy, and we are pleased to bring one of the best consumer protection attorneys in the country to North Carolina," Cooper said in a statement.

Brill graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and received her law degree from New York University. She starts at the end of the month. Her salary has not yet been set.

Stein, a Raleigh Democrat, was the consumer protection chief under Cooper since February 2001.

A group at the New York University School of Law says it has made a public records request to the State Board of Elections for purged voter lists to find out whether voters have been wrongly dropped from the rolls.

The Brennan Center for Justice is studying whether several states wrongly purged voters from their records, Barb Barrett reports.

The center’s investigators looking at states, including North Carolina, because they have had flawed voter purges or registration practices in the past, according to a news release from the Brennan Center.

The group says many states purge voter rolls in secret, without notifying voters.

"There really are no effective national standards to govern voter purges, and the result is a chaotic, whimsical approach to the maintenance of voter rolls," said executive director Michael Waldman.