What's Going On With the NC Supreme Court Race?

 

Why is this man smiling?

Incumbent Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs beat Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin for her seat on the NC Supreme Ct by 734 votes-- Riggs's winning margin after two recounts. Republican Griffin wouldn't and won't concede, has exhausted his appeals to the NC State Board of Elections, and is now petitioning the Paul Newby Supreme Court (on which Justice Riggs still sits but who immediately recused herself from the Griffin suit) to stay the election on the grounds that some 60,000 voters had cast illegal votes. Griffin alleges that those 60,000 registrations are illegal because the registration forms are missing important data.

The idea of using incomplete voter registration as an excuse for throwing out votes seems to have been hatched in a secret group chat in July of 2024 involving the highest echelons of election denialism in North Carolina. So said ProPublica, which somehow or other obtained a recording of that phone call (or Zoom meetup or whatever it was) and spilled the beans just before Christmas that this is what happened back in...

July 2024 -- The call involving the so-called Election Integrity Network, including presumably the notorious Cleta Mitchell who can spot fraud in her oatmeal -- this bunch of MAGA activists tossed around potential tactics that might need to be employed to win the election. One particular idea won approval, that they individually or as a group "try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number." That argument depended on the Federal HAVA Act (Help America Vote) which now requires both driver's license and SS#. Older state registration forms did not.

It's important to underline the most significant revelation in ProPublica's disclosure of the July call: 

The idea of using clerical messiness as an excuse to disenfranchise voters, according to what ProPublica heard on their tape, "was resisted by two activists on the call," "including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network" [Jim Womack?]. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader [Womack?] said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts" (ProPublica). If that was Jim Womack raising the objection, then Jim Womack is a straight shooter.

August 2024 --  The Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party put into action the plan from July. They sued the State Board of Elections (SBOE), seeking to disenfrachise some 225,000 registered voters, relying on the legal theory of the Cleta Mitchell election-deniars. The suit went to Federal Judge Richard E. Myers II, a Trump appointee.

October 14th -- Moving quickly, Judge Myers hears the NCGOP petition to disenfranchise over 200K voters.

October 17th -- Judge Myers rules: dismisses a big part of the GOP petition -- disenfranchising those 200K -- but sends a subsidiary constitutional issue back to state Superior Court (where I guess it still percolates, if slowly)

That background from last October helps explain where Jefferson Griffin has been coming from in his far-out refusal to admit defeat, Because the whole Griffin argument for throwing out 60,000 actual votes -- not just voter registrations -- is the same "missing info" argument that Judge Myers heard back in October. (Though ... WARNING! Myers dismissed the GOP suit from August on the technicality of "standing," so he didn't have to deal with some of the harder legal stuff. Griffin would appear to have standing in this present case, no?)

Here's my timeline for more recent developments:

December 11th -- The NC State Board of Elections denies Griffin's request to simply throw out the votes of 60,000 people.

December 18th -- Griffin files what's known as a "writ of prohibition," asking the state's high court to block certification of the election, and to invalidate some 60,000 challenged ballots because of missing driver's license numbers or the last four digits of SS #s, etc. Griffin's petition included the plea, in ALL CAPS: "Immediate action requested BEFORE Monday, 23 December."

December 19th -- State Board of Elections gets the Griffin case removed to Federal court. Judge Richard E. Myers II of Wilmington assigned to hear it.

December 20th -- Judge Myers bats down the Griffin team's next move, which is to petition for a temporary restraining order to be slapped on the SBOE to block it from certifying the election. Judge Myers says no dice.

December 27th -- Judge Myers receives petition from Griffin's side to move this case back to the NC Supreme Court, and he significantly orders the SBOE to explain why he should keep a case involving a dispute over the recent state Supreme Court election. The judge ordered the elections board to "show cause" by Jan. 1 why the case should not return to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

January 1, 2025 -- The "immediate judicial action" requested of the Paul Newby Supreme Court on Dec. 18th (above) has, of course, not happened, because Federal Judge Myers still has control of the case, although he showed some willingness (Dec. 27th) to let it go back to a more partisanly compliant Supreme Court,