North Carolina Republicans restart the steal

If you can't beat 'em, try to get 60,000 votes tossed out.

Allison Riggs in 2022. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty)

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Earlier this week, conservatives on the North Carolina Supreme Court waded into the fight over who gets to join their ranks, blocking state officials from certifying the reelection of one of their current colleagues, Democrat Allison Riggs.

If this feels wrong and corrupt and basically Courts Gone Wild, that’s because it is. But by now, this sort of behavior from right-wing jurists is par for the course.

Indeed, the entire affair is a microcosm of the last several years, a one-stop-shop highlighting all the ways in which Republicans have used the nonexistent problem of election fraud to destroy trust in elections and make it harder to vote. And if Riggs’s challenger, Jefferson Griffin, prevails here, Republicans will have succeeded in using that nonexistent voter fraud to steal a state supreme court seat.

The GOP challenge doesn’t pass the smell test

Riggs was appointed by outgoing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, while Griffin was initially appointed to a district court seat by former GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and then elected to the court of appeals. On election night 2024, Riggs was trailing, but absentee and provisional ballots put her over the top several days later.

Riggs’s narrow 734-vote victory has survived two recounts. Griffin isn’t fighting that result over the narrow question of whether a few hundred votes were miscounted. Instead, he’s been demanding for weeks that a staggering 60,000 votes be thrown out.

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Two challenges are to absentee voters. Griffin is targeting ballots from overseas citizens who never lived in the state but whose parents were eligible voters before leaving the country, as well as ballots cast by military or overseas citizens lacking certain photo identification. He’s also going after registered in-state voters, though, bringing a mass challenge to people whose registration is missing certain information.

If some of these demands sound familiar, it’s because they are. The GOP spent the 2024 election cycle preemptively attacking absentee ballots as illegitimate and prone to fraud. In the fall of 2024, Republicans tried to disenfranchise overseas voters in multiple swing states, including North Carolina. They had a grab bag of theories, including that North Carolina was wrongfully allowing Americans living overseas to register even if they’d never lived in the state. That got tossed, as North Carolina law actually does allow people born overseas to state residents to vote even if they have never lived in the state or the US.

Republicans were also behind a 2024 attempt to remove 225,000 registered voters from the North Carolina voter rolls. State voter registration forms must collect a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a social security number. If people have neither of those, they check a box.

North Carolina’s form had a spot for that data, but some confusing form design meant that people might have thought providing the information was optional. However, checking a box didn’t make it so that magically no identification was required. Instead, when those individuals showed up to vote for the first time after registering, they were required to provide a document with their current name and address, such as a utility bill or bank statement.

The GOP wanted the state to remove those 225,000 people from the rolls or, failing that, make those nearly quarter-million duly registered voters cast a provisional ballot. Though the case is still kicking around, they didn’t succeed in their attack before the election, in part because of how close to Election Day the challenge was brought.

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In case anyone is under the illusion that the lawsuit was borne out of some organic and genuine concern about election safety, don’t be.

The challenge to the state’s registration form was first brought in 2023 by Carol Snow, a North Carolina resident who calls herself an election denier and works with the Election Integrity Network (EIN). The EIN was founded by Cleta Mitchell, one of the attorneys who worked with Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election. ProPublica found that on a July 2024 call for the North Carolina EIN chapter, an election denier argued that a candidate could use this voter registration argument to try to reverse the outcome of a close election. According to ProPublica, that person’s argument became the foundation for both the RNC challenge before the 2024 election and Griffin’s bid to overturn his loss.

Now, literally none of these challenges have ever been based on an actual factual person who was otherwise ineligible to vote somehow managing to do so thanks to a wonky form. Indeed, in May 2024, the state examined Snow’s slapdash grab bag of accusations in her complaint and found nothing there.

But it isn’t just that no one could point to a single instance of an ineligible voter casting a ballot before the 2024 election that makes Griffin’s current attempt to bootstrap this issue so galling. It’s that for the 2024 election itself, North Carolina had a new voter identification requirement, so people had to provide an acceptable photo ID to vote.

Because of that, Griffin obviously needed to switch gears a bit. So now, he’s asserting that people whose voter registration forms were missing such info were never properly eligible to vote in the first place, requiring that their ballots be thrown out.

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This is the sort of thing that should be laughed out of court — any and every court. The idea that people who showed up with proper identification and voted should have their votes invalidated months after an election because they might have filled out a form wrong years ago is absurd.

The fact that the North Carolina State Supreme Court didn’t say just that in response to Griffin’s demand is appalling. That’s not just because Griffin’s demands are objectively anti-democratic, but also because the state supreme court simply shouldn’t get to decide to thwart the will of the voters and seat their preferred candidate. The state supreme court shouldn’t even get to decide to temporarily block the certification of an election after the statutorily allowed recounts. Even if the court ultimately rules for Riggs, the damage to the system is profound.

The current chief justice of the court, Paul Newby, is open pals with Griffin but didn’t see fit to recuse from agreeing to block certification of Riggs’s victory. (Riggs, being a principled jurist, recused herself from the matter.) When Griffin ran for the court of appeals in 2020, Newby promoted his campaign. Newby’s wife, along with the spouses of three other justices, have sent over $12,000 Griffin’s way in this and past campaigns. Griffin describes Newby as a good friend and mentor, and when launching his 2024 campaign, he declared that his team knew how to win, having helped elect Newby and other Republican justices.

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Newby has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t care about appearances, hoisting the same “An Appeal to Heaven” flag that Justice Sam Alito got called out for. Newby’s defense was much the same as Alito’s — he simply had no idea whatsoever that the flag was associated with January 6 or Trump’s election denialism. Newby also shares Alito’s enthusiasm for refusing to recuse himself, routinely ruling on cases involving companies in which he and his wife hold stock.

Speaking of Alito, Griffin added a new member to his legal team earlier this week. Though Griffin’s entire argument of why this case needs to be in front of his pals at the state supreme court rather than the federal court rests on how this case involves disputed questions specific to North Carolina law, his latest attorney has no connection to the state at all. Kyle Hawkins is a Texas attorney, but while he doesn’t know anything about North Carolina, he does know about Sam Alito, having clerked for him. To be fair to Hawkins, though, as the Solicitor General of Texas from 2018 to 2021, he routinely went to court on behalf of Texas’s attempts to make voting much harder.

Playing dirty, even when the stakes are low

Which brings us right back where we started. Democrats have consistently made expansion of the franchise of voting important — that it should be easier to register and easier to vote. Republicans, on the other hand, have consistently tried to make fewer people eligible to vote — particularly young people and people of color.

Republicans have also made it their mission to make voting more difficult. Where Griffin really takes things to the next level with this lawsuit, though, is by declaring that even if people did vote, it doesn’t matter. Even those people who jumped through every hoop North Carolina throws at them shouldn’t get to decide who wins if Republicans don’t like the result.

None of this is about voter fraud or election integrity or anything of the sort. It’s about the raw exercise of power, of the shattering of norms, of the outright refusal to believe that more people wanted a Democrat to win. It’s about pulling every lever available.

Right now, Riggs’s election certification is stayed. The parties have an expedited briefing schedule, with all briefs being wrapped up by January 24. However, there’s a parallel fight in federal court right now as well, as Riggs and the Democrats are arguing this case belongs back in federal court. Riggs is asking the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to take the case away from the state and rule for her. If the circuit court won’t, the earliest the North Carolina State Supreme Court has said it will hear oral arguments in this is February. And of course, everyone can and will appeal everything at every possible level here. It may be months before we know whether Justice Riggs gets to take the seat that there’s no doubt she won.

Perhaps worst of all, none of this is necessary for the GOP to hold the state supreme court. It’s nothing but spiking the football. If Riggs stays on the court, Republicans still dominate the court 5-2. Yes, this fight isn’t for the majority. It isn’t even for a supermajority — conservatives already have that. It’s just to deny Riggs her seat, to flex their muscles, and to bring home the fact that voting only matters if you vote the right way. In other words, it’s business as usual for the modern right.

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That’s it for this week

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