North Carolina Republicans Try a Judicial Coup
The Democratic incumbent got more votes. Now the Republican challenger is trying to throw out tens of thousands of them.`
The Democratic incumbent got more votes. Now the Republican challenger is trying to throw out tens of thousands of them.`
www.theatlantic.com
“… In 2020, when sitting Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, requested recounts in a race she lost by 401 votes, Republicans ridiculed her as a sore loser wasting her dignity and everyone else’s time. (Beasley eventually conceded.) Yet now Griffin was going further. He filed a request with the state board to throw out some 60,000 votes, arguing the voters were not properly registered.
The largest group of registrations that Griffin has challenged are North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers. This is now required by law, but these voters registered using old forms that didn’t include the requirement. (They were not required to re-register.)
The second set is overseas residents who have not lived in North Carolina, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad. A third is overseas voters who didn’t submit a photo identification with their ballot.
… The first is the most notable tranche. These voters likely understood themselves to be legally registered, and elections officials had concluded they were registered. Prior to the election, the Republican National Committee challenged 225,000 registrations on the same basis, but a federal judge dismissed the case. The state board also concluded that the registrations were valid, and said that fraud was virtually impossible. For one thing, voters are required to show photo ID before voting, in accordance with a state law that went into effect this year. (The group includes both of Riggs’s
parents, as well as
a politics editor at WUNC, a public-radio station in Chapel Hill.)
… North Carolina is not new to vicious election fights. (Riggs rose to prominence as a progressive attorney focused on voting-rights cases.) In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court demolished key elements of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans passed a sweeping law restricting voting. A federal judge eventually
struck the lawdown as targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The state has also seen decades of battles over redistricting; after previous maps were struck down as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, the GOP instead
pursued an aggressively partisan map. In the previous Congress, both Democrats and Republicans from North Carolina held seven seats; under a new GOP-drawn map, Republicans won 10 seats to Democrats’ four in November.
…
Even so, the reaction to Griffin’s attempted maneuvers has been sharp, and not only on the left.
In a recent article, the conservative writer and former GOP operative Andrew Dunn wrote that while he had often criticized Democrats’ “dishonest nonsense” about Republicans in the past, he could not do so now.
“
If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal,” he wrote. “This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans ‘stealing’ a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against.”
Dunn is right. If the court ultimately sides with Griffin and throws the votes out, it will be a plain message that the Republican majority is more interested in grabbing power by any means available and adding an amenable colleague than in letting voters have a say. …”
