Terri Cude

Here's where things stand in North Carolina's Supreme Court race. Justice @AllisonJRiggs won November's election for the NC Supreme court. She won narrowly, by only 734 votes out of 5.7 million cast (!), but a win is still a win. (This is hardly something new. Republican Justice Paul Newby won his seat over Democratic incumbent Justice Cheri Beasley by only 401 votes in 2020.) The losing Republican candidate @JGriffinNC and the @NCGOP is asking the Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court itself to throw out at least 60,000 ballots, overturn the election, and make him the winner. Meanwhile, @AllisonJRiggs has asked the federal Fourth Circuit appeals court to hear the case. It could even go up to SCOTUS - no one knows. Federal courts generally trump state ones, but state courts generally have jurisdiction over state law. So no one's completely sure where it's going to land. What's this case about? The @JGriffinNC campaign's argument is that more than 60,000 votes are not valid because the voters have invalid registrations. The reason they give is that the federal Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, required all voter registration forms nationally to henceforth collect drivers license or social security numbers (or to use some other unique numbering system) to track registrations. And North Carolina did begin collecting SSNs/drivers license numbers on voter registration forms then, but did not change the language on the form to require them until 2023. So in addition to the many voters who registered prior to 2002 and lack that information, a small number of voters who have registered since 2002 also lack that information on their registrations. (They still verify their identity using other methods, including showing photo ID to vote in 2024.) There are a lot of problems with this argument: 1 - All of the 60,000+ voters @JGriffinNC and the @NCGOP seeks to nullify are actually real, valid voters who filled out registration forms as they were supposed to. In fact, the Griffin campaign has failed to show that even 1 single voter on their list is illegitimate in any way. Perhaps the forms should have used different language prior to 2023 - but that isn't the voters' fault. 2 - A federal court already shot down this exact argument as frivolous: carolinapublicpress.org/6650… 3 - Bizarrely, Griffin and the NCGOP campaign is only seeking to throw out votes as they apply to the Court election. They are not asking to also invalidate votes in other statewide elections - for example, for President. In fact, the NCGOP is asking for votes for Trump to count, but the votes for Riggs to be cancelled, from many of the very same ballots. 4 - Nearly every element of the voter registration process in the state of North Carolina has been crafted by Republican lawmakers, who have controlled the state legislature for 13 years. They have made big changes to the voter registration process through laws passed in both 2013 and 2015. If the process still isn't right, those lawmakers are to blame. Could other election outcomes be changed? No one really knows. This is all totally uncharted territory. If the Republican majority on the NC Supreme Court did throw out all those votes, then the next obvious question would be - what other elections would that impact? There are several legislative elections whose outcome could change, but they've already been certified and the members sworn-in. Could they somehow be de-certified? Anything's possible, if you don't care about the rule of law. And that's really what this whole matter is about. This isn't really a legal case at all - Griffin's argument is utter nonsense. This is a purely political power grab, and we can all see it.