Stealing your 60,000 votes
Despite what you’ve heard, the 2024 election is not over. Republicans treated Donald Trump’s failed 2020 effort to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in court and via an insurrection on the Capitol steps as a how-to manual. They’re emulating Trump right now in North Carolina.
Republican Kari Lake lost the Arizoina governor’s race in 2022 to Democrat Katie Hobbs. No way, said Lake. She refused to concede and fought it out in court deep into 2024. Lake still refused to acknowldge losing even as she ran for and lost her 2024 U.S. Senate race.
Bryan Anderson of Anderson Alerts substack comments on the North Carolina Supreme Court race in which Justice Allison Riggs defeated Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes after multiple recounts. Griffin is going to court:
North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin on Wednesday asked the 5-2 conservative majority state Supreme Court to intervene in a race where he presently trails Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.
Griffin is specifically asking the high court to step in by Monday to prevent certification of the election, bypass a lower court and discard the ballots of more than 60,000 voters who state and county elections administrators have concluded were legitimately cast. In doing so, he believes he could overtake Riggs’ lead.
Griffin is largely seeking to toss out ballots of people whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number, arguing that such incomplete registrations render their votes ineligible.
That argument was partially rejected in federal court shortly before the November election, with a Trump-appointed judge concluding such intervention could move the country “away from a democratic form of government.”
The rest is behind a paywall, but you get the point. Four friends from my county are on Griffin’s list.
Remember, Griffin ran for and lost a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist, reminded readers last week, “In embracing the North Carolina Republican ‘politics of façade,’ Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.” Griffin means to prove Nichol right by litigiating his loss until he wins or can litigate no more.
It’s a Trumpish variation on an old Republican theme. If they win, the election was fair. If they lose, Democrats cheated. Normally, the perps are those ubiquitous yet invisible voter fraudsters:
Voter fraud frauds have for years scare-mongered Republican voters that should anyone anywhere cast even a single ballot improperly, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They are careful to personalize it for their white audience. They have spun the all-but-nonexistent problem into a widespread one (that isn’t) requiring draconian voting restrictions. Those laws, in their “majestic equality,” apply to all yet, just coincidentally, predominantly impact minorities of voters that tend to vote for Democrats.
Griffin and accomplices in this case are themselves trying to steal 60,000 of “your votes” in broad daylight with court filings. Shamelessness is their superpower.
Thank you sharing this Sanctuary of Sanity with us each day.
Happy Hollandaise!