Republican attempts to overturn an election in North Carolina

Republicans in the Tarheel State want even more control over the state's Supreme Court. Here's how they're trying to throw out more than 60,000 votes in a power grab.

Imagine a scenario in which Kamala Harris won the election and Donald Trump refused to concede. It’s not that hard because Trump had been essentially saying as much for months on the campaign trail. All signs pointed to a months-long fight over election results that would have culminated in congressional certification on January 6.

Now, imagine that as part of his false claims that the election was stolen from him, Trump directly challenged the votes of Harris’ parents. Seems implausible, right? It would seem like an act of fiction. But that exact scenario is what’s playing out in North Carolina at the moment. A Republican judge named Jefferson Griffin has refused to concede his loss to Justice Allison Riggs for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. As part of his claims that more than 60,000 people illegally voted, Griffin is claiming that Riggs’ own parents were technically ineligible to vote thanks to a technicality on their voter registration forms.

Today, the North Carolina State Board of Elections is expected to decide on the matter — and make a determination whether to throw out 60,273 votes that Griffin contends were cast by people with errors on their voter registration forms.

The technical ins and outs of this fight are detailed in a story I have out this morning at Rolling Stone but the short version is this: Griffin’s interpretation of state law contends that voters must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when filling out certain voter registration forms. Griffin hired a Republican political consulting firm to dig through state voting records and find voters whose forms did not include these numbers, and who had voted in the November election, which Griffin lost by less than 800 votes.

Now, he’s claiming that more than 60,000 votes should be thrown out as a result of the firm’s analysis of voter data. But all of this has been known. What has been missing from press coverage of Griffin’s contesting of Riggs’ election win has been the proper context of his fight: Griffin is engaged in the exact type of election denial tactics that would have been used by Trump if he had lost in November, and could be used by Republicans in future elections should they feel the need to tap into their election denier base.

The State Board of Elections — which has a Democratic majority — is set to decide on the matter today. Democrats in North Carolina tell me they expect the decision to go their way. If it does, Griffin is likely to continue suing the board in state court, a case that may rise to the Supreme Court itself.

While Griffin may be technically correct that voters who registered without the requisite numbers could be in violation of state law, he’s pursuing a dangerous precedent. (Side note: It’s also entirely possible that the forms themselves didn’t ask for ID numbers, making the technical errors the fault of the State Election Board that created the forms, not the voters who filled them out.) By going after obscure, technical errors in order to negate votes that look like they’re largely for his opponent, Griffin is fomenting the election denial presumption that any error or glitch in the voting or registration process is indicative of fraud when there’s no evidence to support that. Does Griffin really believe that Riggs’ own parents are actually ineligible to vote?