December 10, 2024 5:30 am

North Carolina Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin was fully within his rights in recent weeks to request a pair of recounts in his razor-thin loss to incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. While the number of result-altering recounts – either in North Carolina or anywhere else in the country – has been microscopic in recent years, anyone who loses by 700-plus votes in an election in which more than 5.5 million votes are cast certainly has a right to make sure.

Four years ago, then-incumbent Democratic Chief Justice Cheri Beasley pursued the same course when she came up short against Republican challenger Paul Newby by an even smaller margin.

Of course, the elephant-sized difference in the two situations is that when the recounts confirmed Beasley’s defeat, she issued a gracious concession in which she congratulated her opponent and lauded state election officials for their hard work. Griffin – an archconservative who lists U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as one of his ideological heroes — has chosen a different path. In keeping with the modern-day guiding premise of the Trump Republican Party that coming out on top — however it’s accomplished — is everything, Griffin has filed a massive challenge to the ballots of tens of thousands of citizens in an effort to have them thrown out.

As NC Newsline’s Lynn Bonner has reported at length, most of the challenges appear to be based on the technicality that the registrations for the voters in question – many of them decades old — may not have included a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number as is required.

And while the attempted purge – which GOP lawyers cooked up and would have undoubtedly sought to employ in the event of a Trump loss in the state’s presidential contest – has been simmering since the weeks before the election when it was first tried unsuccessfully, it remains a deeply flawed and dangerous scheme.

First and most obvious among the problems is that it would – if somehow approved by election officials and/or the courts – disenfranchise thousands of people who have been voting lawfully for years, and in many instances decades, who had no knowledge of any issue with their registration.

What’s more, as Bonner reported on Monday of this week, as many as 21 of these individuals are current elected officials – a fact that would arguably invalidate their elections from past years if the challenges somehow succeeded.

Republican Taylor Vorbeck, a Lee County commissioner, whose registration has been challenged, told Bonner that her reaction upon being apprised of the challenge was, “I don’t even know how that’s possible.” She acknowledged receiving one of the thousands of the junk-mail-like postcards that the GOP mass produced on the matter and sent out via the USPS, but said, “That still didn’t tell me anything.”

When asked about the challenge to his registration, Wayne County Republican Board of Education member Wayne Leatham said, “It makes no sense to me.”

And the list of challenged longtime voters goes on. In an online post, Justice Riggs pointed out that even her parents were on the challenged list.

While it’s at least possible to imagine a scenario in which, at some point not immediately adjacent to an election, it might conceivably make sense to initiate what would no doubt be a lengthy process to contact voters and cure any possible errors their registration forms, the idea of a sudden and massive retroactive purge a few weeks after the election is absurd and outrageous.

This is especially true given that, in order to vote last month, all of the voters in question had to comply with the requirements of the state’s new voter ID law.

The idea that registered voters who complied with the state’s voter ID law when they voted were still somehow ineligible to vote as Griffin contends, is almost as ridiculous as the idea of forcing tens of thousands of people to come and prove the validity of their registrations a month or more after they voted.

As a challenged voter who grew up with Griffin, remains his Facebook friend, and has been registered for 27 years told Carolina Public Press of the challenge to her vote, “that’s a bunch of bull.” Others contacted by veteran good government watchdog Bob Hall called their challenges “ridiculous” and “shameful.”

Indeed, there’s a reason that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 bars voter purges 90 days prior to an election – to prevent the grave injustice of legitimate voters losing their fundamental constitutional right. It’s a bit of logic that obviously applies right after an election as well.

Sadly, however, none of this is terribly surprising in today’s Trumpified Republican Party, where paranoid conspiracy theories, uncompromising ideological fanaticism, and the refusal to acknowledge defeat have become articles of a toxic faith. The ultimate outcome of Griffin’s challenge will say much about how far down this particular rabbit hole our state has fallen.