Dem
47
GOP
53
The saga continues in the race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed all state court orders mandating that certain voters cure alleged registration defects within 30 days in order to have their votes counted in the 2024 North Carolina state Supreme Court race. The federal district court had denied the request for a stay made by winning candidate Allison Riggs, so she went to the court of appeals, which has now granted it to avoid any voter confusion while the case plays out in federal court.
Adding to the intrigue, following the state Supreme Court's ruling that some voters could be required to provide additional information in order for their votes to count, there are now disputes as to which voters are actually affected. North Carolina election officials now say that only 1,409 ballots from one county, Guilford, are subject to challenge. The NC State Board of Elections found that other challenges are invalid because Jefferson Griffin, the losing candidate, missed the deadline for raising issues.
As a reminder, this case is not about curing ballots, such as if a return address was left off a mail-in ballot, or whether an election board can count an absentee ballot received after the deadline. This is about registered voters whose registration is being challenged after the fact. Everyone, including Griffin, agrees that the voters did nothing wrong. They registered to vote properly, were added to the voter rolls, and dutifully and lawfully cast ballots in the November election for this race and other races. But now Griffin wants to disenfranchise some of them, from his race only AND after the fact, because he alleges they were not asked to provide ID at the time they registered to vote. To illustrate this, (L) registered to vote at her current address 17 years ago—this is the equivalent of someone saying to her, "Hey, your vote doesn't count in the 2024 U.S. Senate race because we didn't ask you for a utility bill verifying your residency at the time you registered to vote—oops, our bad. But don't worry, your vote for president still counts!" All the other races on the North Carolina ballot have been certified and all of these voters that Griffin is challenging voted in those other races and those votes were duly counted. And, in what is surely just a big coincidence, Griffin is only challenging voters in heavily Democratic counties.
What we have seen in the past, from voter suppression groups, are efforts to cull voter rolls BEFORE elections take place by challenging the legality of certain registrations. In those cases, voters can correct any deficiencies before the next election. But if voters can be retroactively kicked off voter rolls and their ballots thrown out after an election, when it is undisputed that the voters followed all the rules, then every vote in every election can be called into question. Voters would not be able to rely on the rules when they registered to vote because they can be changed or interpreted differently after the fact—essentially changing the rules after the game has been played, which would further erode confidence in the country's electoral process. And if you thought the Republicans' efforts to overturn the 2020 election were outrageous, you ain't seen nothing yet. If these tactics are found to be legal, you can take this to its logical conclusion: Every winning candidate who faces these types of challenges will be forced to bring their own challenges in counties that favor their opponents in the hope of cancelling out an equivalent number of voters. There will be no end to the gamesmanship and it will consume the already overworked and under-resourced elections officials. (L)