Saith The Lord Trump
Give Republicans their due. They are relentless.
They lost a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by 734 votes after fighting in court for six months to overturn the 2024 election lost by Judge Jefferson Griffin (R). Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs (D) was sworn in on May 13. Now the GOP wants vengeance.
Election-watchers knew (or should have) that that was not the end of it (WRAL):
North Carolina has failed to comply with federal law requiring accurate voter lists and isn’t doing enough to fix those deficiencies, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged in a lawsuit Tuesday against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
The lawsuit, filed by the administration of Republican President Donald Trump, says the state should’ve done more to verify the identity of voters in the state to ensure no fraud is occurring. It specifically hones in on thousands of people from whom the state’s database of registered voters doesn’t include a driver’s license number or Social Security number.
If you think the complaint is about preserving election integrity, preventing voter fraud, voter confidence in elections, etc., I’ve got a condo at 725 5th Ave. to sell you.
The complaint echoes the lawsuits filed by the RNC, the North Carolina Republican Party and Griffin, citing the Help America Vote Act and, of course, Trump’s Executive Order 14248 entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
Griffin and Trump have each focused on a state database that’s supposed to contain the driver’s license number or Social Security number of all registered voters, to prove they are who they say they are. Such lists are required by a federal law called the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, passed in 2002 to modernize voting rules and administration nationwide.
That law was the focus of the federal lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which says the state isn’t doing enough to stop voter fraud. Trump has repeatedly made false claims about voter fraud, including about his loss in the 2020 election. Although those claims were thrown out in court by the dozens after the 2020 election, polls show many Republican voters still lack faith in American elections.
Do tell?
The filing demands an order for the State Board to draft a plan within 30 days for updating its digital voter file. The DOJ insists that the state contact all registered voters whose DL or SS numbers do not appear in the record. Never mind that the state already has those numbers on file for perhaps half of those voters. But due to clerical errors, local laziness, or lack of time, those numbers were never populated into the state’s database.
The state also insists that, owing to the GOP-controlled legislature’s passage of a photo ID requirement, “that everyone who voted in 2024 had to show photo identification to vote, or provide their Social Security number if they lacked ID. State and county elections officials have also encouraged people on the list of voters with missing information to provide it again.”
The lawsuit does not expressly ask that voters who do not reply to the state’s request for the information be purged from the rolls. “A spokesperson for the DOJ did not respond to CNN’s request for clarity.” But it “takes issue with the ‘ad hoc’ plan the state board has put forward for updating the existing registrations missing the information – by having county officials collect it if and when those voters show up at polling places to vote.”
They are relentless. Griffin demanded after the election was over that the votes of “incompletely” registered persons be deleted from the count in his race. It was a trial balloon for how Republicans might overturn elections everywhere that don’t go their way. It failed. This is the next gambit.
On first glance, I thought it ironic that the Trump DOJ was demanding remedial action from the State Board. It fell under GOP control as of this month. But the State Board is already underfunded by the GOP-controlled legislature. Should the DOJ lawsuit prevail, do not expect the legislature to provide additional funds for fully complying. This will ensure that the database issue will remain alive for the next general election cycle. Purging voters then will be much more impactful. And beneficial to the GOP.
My suspicion based on language contained in the filing is that their next target is eliminating early voting with same-day registration. Stay tuned.
Update: Added “with same-day registration” in para. above.
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