Absentee voting will be handled by a Wake County Board of Elections employee. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
Judge Jefferson Griffin of the Republican Court of Appeals in North Carolina was well within his rights in recent weeks to request a few recounts in his razor-thin loss to incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. While the number of outcome-changing recounts — in North Carolina or anywhere else in the country — has been microscopic in recent years, anyone who loses by more than 700 votes in an election in which more than 5.5 million votes are cast certainly has a chance. right to be sure.
Four years ago, then-Democratic Chief Justice Cheri Beasley followed the same course when she fell short by an even smaller margin against Republican challenger Paul Newby.
The big difference between the two situations, of course, is that when the recounts confirmed Beasley’s defeat, she made a gracious concession in which she congratulated her opponent and praised election officials for their hard work. Griffin — an archconservative who cites U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as one of his ideological heroes — has chosen a different path. In keeping with the contemporary guiding principle of Trump’s Republican Party that coming out on top – however it is achieved – is everything, Griffin has massively challenged the ballots of tens of thousands of citizens in an effort to have them thrown out. .
As NC Newsline’s Lynn Bonner has reported at length, most of the challenges appear to be based on the technical fact that the voter registrations in question — many of which are decades old — may not include the driver’s license number or the last four digits of the driver’s license contain. the voter’s Social Security number, as required.
And while the attempted purge — which Republican lawyers have masterminded and would no doubt have tried to deploy in the event of a Trump loss in the state’s presidential election — has been simmering since the weeks before the election, when it was Although it was first tried without success, it remains a deeply flawed and dangerous plan.
The first and most obvious problem is that – if it is somehow approved by election officials and/or the courts – it would disenfranchise thousands of people who have been lawfully voting for years, and in many cases decades. voted and who had no knowledge of any problem with the elections. their registration.
Furthermore, as Bonner reported on Monday this week, as many as 21 of these individuals are currently elected officials – a fact that arguably their elections in recent years if the challenges were somehow successful.
Republican Taylor Vorbeck, a Lee County commissioner whose registration has been challenged, told Bonner that her response when informed of the challenge was, “I don’t even know how that’s possible.” She acknowledged that she had received one of the thousands of junk-mail-style postcards that the GOP crowd had produced on the issue and sent through the USPS, but said, “That still didn’t mean anything to me.”
When asked about the challenge to his registration, Wayne Leatham, a member of the Wayne County Republican Board of Education, said, “It doesn’t make any sense.”
And the list of challenged longtime voters goes on. In an online post, Judge Riggs pointed out that even her parents were on the list of challenges.
While it is at least possible to imagine a scenario where, at some point not immediately adjacent to an election, it might make sense to initiate an undoubtedly lengthy process of contacting voters and correct any errors in their registration forms. The idea of a sudden and massive retroactive purge a few weeks after the elections is absurd and outrageous.
This is especially true because, in order to vote last month, all voters in question had to meet the requirements of the state’s new voter ID law.
The idea that registered voters who obeyed state law when they voted were somehow still ineligible to vote, as Griffin claims, is almost as ridiculous as the idea of voting out tens of thousands of people. force them to prove the validity of their registration. month or more after they vote.
As a challenged voter who grew up with Griffin, remains his Facebook friend and has been registered for 27 years, Carolina told Public Press about the challenge of casting her ballot: “That’s a bunch of bull.” Others contacted by veteran good government watchdog Bob Hall called their challenges “ridiculous” and “shameful.”
Indeed, there is a reason that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prohibits voter purges 90 days before an election – to prevent legitimate voters from losing their basic constitutional right. It is a piece of logic that of course also applies immediately after elections.
Unfortunately, however, none of this is very surprising in today’s Trumpified Republican Party, where paranoid conspiracy theories, uncompromising ideological fanaticism and a refusal to acknowledge defeat have become articles of toxic faith. The ultimate outcome of Griffin’s challenge will say a lot about how far our state has fallen down this particular rabbit hole.
