The North Carolina Supreme Court election-cheating cookie cutter

North Carolina Supreme Court justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, won re-election to her seat in November by 734 votes. Because it was a percentage-wise close race, a recount was automatically triggered. Her margin of victory was confirmed. A second recount again confirmed her victory. So that’s that and democracy wins again, right? Not so fast.

In a 4-2 decision on January 8th, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked election officials from certifying Riggs’ re-election. Four Republican justices voted to put the certification on hold while they decide whether to grant a request by the challenger, Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, to cancel 60,000 votes and declare him the winner.

Griffin isn’t claiming voter fraud here. Instead he claims a cynically contrived technicality. He argues that those 60,000 votes shouldn’t count because their registration forms didn’t include the voter’s Social Security number or any other identifying number. But the voting rules in place at the time of the election didn’t require that information. It’s also worth noting that everyone who voted at the polls had to show a photo ID this time around.

Interestingly, all the other elections in North Carolina were certified. So presumably the 60,000 ballots that Griffin wants to toss out won’t disqualify the votes on those ballots that apply to others, such as Donald Trump. In other words, Griffin regards only the part of those ballots where Riggs got the nod as invalid. The rest are just fine.

To employ an arcane legal term, this is no-brainer. The idea that a court can arbitrarily disenfranchise three million North Carolinians because they don’t like the outcome of an election should have no place in a democracy. What’s more, this is what you might call a surgical disqualification. Only Riggs’ vote gets cancelled. This is nothing more than the same old tired Republican cheating playbook.

The fact that this story is getting very little traction in the legacy media is a scandal in itself. The implications could be deeply destructive to American democracy if Griffin wins this case. It could effectively create a legal cookie cutter that can be reused in other states to disenfranchise voters by the multiple millions.

Republicans are forever whining that Democrats cheat to win elections. This absurdity was claimed by Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. The vicious, odious idiot Kari Lake made the same claim about her lost race for the governorship of Arizona. But all the evidence of actual election cheating and collusion falls squarely on the shoulders of Republicans, and this despicable business in North Carolina is nothing more than a canonical instance of the kind.

As of this writing, several Democrats, including a small number of the disenfranchised voters, have filed federal lawsuits, asking a federal district court to order the state to certify the election result. But last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by Donald Trump, remanded the case back to the state Supreme Court, which has a partisan GOP majority that has repeatedly ruled in favor of Republican politicians in the past.

I can’t overstate how important this matter is. If the North Carolina Supreme Court decides in favour of Griffin, that result could effectively end democracy in any state where Republicans have a Supreme Court majority. Meanwhile Justice Allison Riggs, as one of the claimants in one of the lawsuits contesting this nonsense, is facing mounting legal bills. If you want to help her with her costs, you can do so here.