The GOP is just getting warmed up
When Republicans win elections, they celebrate and move on. When they lose, they scream foul and launch lawsuits. And insurrections. Americans marked the fourth anniversary of the Trump insurrection on Monday. Donald Trump was impeached and indicted for trying to steal the presidential election he lost in 2020.
North Carolina Republicans now mean to steal 60,000 votes and an entire statewide election. In broad daylight. In court. For a Republican state Supreme Court candidate, a judge yet. Two recounts confirm that Jefferson Griffin lost his election to incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. Griffin’s attorneys hired Republican political consulting firm Coldspark to identify potential votes for challenge.
Four people I know, friends, including the former local president of the NAACP, are among the 60,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents whose votes Judge Griffin wants vacated so he can sit on the state’s highest court. Griffin means to steal the election ecumenically.
Robert Orr, former associate justice on the state Supreme Court (a former Republican), told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night that the NCGOP likely had this challenge teed up in advance “in case Trump lost North Carolina” by a narrow margin. They’re using that playbook to overturn Riggs’s election instead.
WUNC:
On Tuesday morning, the state board of elections appealed to the 4th Circuit, just a few hours after a federal district court judge granted Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin’s motion to remand his election protest to the state Supreme Court.
The elections board’s federal appeal notwithstanding, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a temporary stay blocking the state elections board from certifying Griffin’s electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs, the incumbent justice he’s trying to unseat.
Lawyers for Griffin use language echoing Donald Trump’s complaints about his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the very complaints he used to launch that the infamous insurrection. The GOP playbook is familiar, Rolling Stone noticed. Griffin held a sizable lead on Election Day but saw it evaporate after the counting of all absentee and provisional ballots. Fraud, clearly.
Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years.
John Eastman-level skeevy
Griffin’s attorneys base their challenge on registration requirements added under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002 (NC Newsline):
The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.
A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names.
Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls. Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said.
Those aren’t the only votes at risk. Also under threat are nearly 300 ballots from voters living overseas, Rolling Stone reports, “including members of the military, a category of voter known as UOCAVA, short for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law.” These include voting-age citizens born to Americans living overseas (to parents from N.C.) but who’ve never actually lived in the state. Federal and state law provide for these Americans to vote in the state of their parents’ last residency. Republicans are challenging their votes as illegitimate anyway.
This is John Eastman-level, skeevy lawyering. The California State Bar Court recommended Eastman’s disbarrment (his license has been suspended). His license to practice law in the District of Columbia is suspended. He still faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona.
How this case impacts you
The (more) insane part of this affair is that Griffin’s election challenge is based on HAVA, a federal law. Throwing the case back to the state Supreme Court makes zero sense. Unless you’re a Trump judge like U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II is.
Secondly, if Republicans succeed in stealing Riggs’s seat based on HAVA, they will deploy the same tactic wherever and whenever they lose elections going forward. They may gut HAVA protections they dislike through congressional action, but will be sure to preserve provisions that allow them to steal elections (and your votes) the way Trump and Eastman attempted to with their fake electors scheme.
Griffin and his legal team are going to fight his election loss all the way to the Supreme Court, and they don’t care if it’s the state’s or SCOTUS. They’re both majority GOP.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals may yet step in and wrest back jurisdiction in this case. The N.C. Supreme Court acknowledged that in its stay order. But unlike Trump whose go-to gambit is delay, delay, delay, “because it concerns certification of an election,” they’re in a hurry to wrap up the steal by the end of January.
Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, Republicans insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They make it personal. Under cover of that faux outrage they’ve launched a thousand efforts at vote suppression. Like this one. They’re coming for your vote next.
