Republicans in my state
are trying to overturn an election. Gee, who gave them that idea?
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By Frank Bruni |
Nothing should be shocking after Jan.
6, 2021, when an American president’s scheming to overturn the legitimate
results of a fair election culminated in the bloody breaching of the Capitol.
Still, I’m aghast at the audacity of what Republicans here in North Carolina
are up to.
They are following in their leader’s
footsteps and trying to steal an
election. And if such an effort
no longer seems as strange and sinister as it did before Donald Trump stormed
onto the political scene and took a torch to whatever scruples still existed,
that’s all the more reason to examine it closely. We need to be clear about
where things stand. With an election denier about to move back into the White
House and his disciples emboldened, our democracy is in danger. That’s the
moral of the North Carolina story. It’s much, much bigger
than this state.
The details: On Nov. 5, a seat on the
North Carolina Supreme Court was up for grabs, and the first official vote
count showed that Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats among the court’s seven
justices, had won re-election by a slim margin. Her Republican challenger,
Jefferson Griffin, demanded recounts. All in all, three separate counts gave
Riggs a victory by slightly over 700 votes.
Which, in a properly functioning
democracy with candidates and elected officials who put civic order and basic
decency above their rapacity for power, would be the end of it. Hah. Griffin
won’t concede. He continues to contest the result, which is being litigated
simultaneously in state and federal courts. There won’t be any resolution for
weeks.
The nature of his
complaint is especially insidious. Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party, which
supports him, aren’t producing evidence of voter fraud or a botched count.
They’re disputing the legitimacy of more than 60,000 ballots, principally
because the registration forms of many of the voters who cast them lack either
a driver’s license or Social Security number, as law requires.
But that doesn’t mean the voters did
anything wrong. Some of them may have registered before that information became
mandatory in 2004. Long after that point, North Carolina routinely accepted
registration forms without it. It’s also possible that voters provided it but
that it’s not present in the state database because of administrative error or
faulty record keeping.
The bottom line is that most or all of
these voters had no reason to believe there was any issue with their status or
their ballots, and they aren’t being accused of malfeasance. They’re just pawns
in Republicans’ last-ditch bid to reverse Griffin’s defeat however possible.
“It’s inexcusable,” Heath Clay, a
Republican city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., whose ballot is among those
60,000, said in a recent article in The Times by Eduardo Medina
and Michael Wines. He in fact voted for Griffin but accepts that North
Carolinians “have spoken” and that Griffin lost, and he considers Griffin’s
attempt to invalidate his and others’ ballots “a direct attack on the voters.”
Clay’s appearance on the list of
voters whose ballots are in dispute demonstrates that Griffin and his
Republican allies can’t even be certain that a new count subtracting those
votes would benefit them. But many of those votes were cast with mailed ballots,
and mailed ballots generally favored Riggs.
Last week, the Republican majority on
the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state election
officials from certifying Riggs’s victory, thus keeping alive the possibility
that Griffin could join their ranks and give them a 6-to-1 advantage over
Democrats, versus the current 5-to-2. That increases the chances of Republican
control of the court for many years.
Which matters not only in principle
but also in practice: The court’s Republican majority has abetted Republican
lawmakers’ aggressive gerrymandering of North Carolina, whose current U.S.
House delegation, for example, contradicts the state’s political complexion.
Although North Carolina has roughly equal numbers of
registered Republicans and registered Democrats and just elected a Democratic
governor, Josh Stein, by a nearly 15-point margin, it has only four Democrats
among its 14 members of the House. It’s in some ways a paradigm of
unrepresentative democracy.
And of Republican ruthlessness. Don’t take it from me. Take it from
Andrew Dunn, a conservative who has worked as a Republican strategist and now
produces a political newsletter in which he recently wrote: “I’ve spent years pushing back
against the left’s tendency to go scorched earth in their rhetoric against N.C.
Republicans. Everything is a ‘state of emergency,’ or ‘threat to democracy’ or
‘war’ on a beloved institution. Most of the time, it’s dishonest nonsense. Not
this time.”
Dunn added that the North Carolina
Supreme Court would destroy its credibility if it rewarded Griffin’s
machinations.
Perhaps one of its own five Republican
justices, Richard Dietz, agrees. In a dissent from his colleagues’ ruling that
Griffin’s complaint should be heard, he wrote: “Permitting post-election
litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result,
remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted
under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief.”
And incredible distrust of, and
disgust with, the whole system. Except “incredible” isn’t the right adjective.
I’m outraged without being the least bit surprised, and I’m almost sure of
this: The fight over Riggs’s court seat is less anomaly than omen.
