Nice Time! Federal Judge Tells North Carolina To Certify That Danged Supreme Court Election Already!

Is this thing finally fixing to get done?!

May 06, 2025

And now let us check in with that North Carolina state supreme court judge race, which has been messier than a mule in an outhouse. More than six months after the election, the race is STILL not certified. But, it’s getting closer! The latest: Chief US District Judge Richard Myers, a Trump appointee even, has ordered that the Democrat/incumbent Allison Riggs be certified as the winner. Finally! Though as a consolation prize, he gave youth-pastor-looking whiny loser Jefferson Griffin a week to appeal the ruling to the Fourth Circuit. Which is thankfully low on weirdos; 12 out of 15 judges were appointed by Democrats. So maybe in a week we will finally be able to move on from this fetid livermush sandwich!

Back in November, Riggs beat Griffin by 734 votes, which was confirmed in multiple recounts. But as Republicans are wont to do, Griffin refused to accept his loss with dignity, and instead smothered the state and all 100 of its counties with lawsuits like gravy on biscuits, demanding that courts throw out more than 65,000 legally cast votes, including all mail-in ballots, and even the votes of Riggs’s parents and her military-veteran father. Griffin didn’t want an election re-do, and didn’t give one lick about how other state races might be affected by that, he just wanted the courts to toss all of those votes out, because he claimed some of the registrations were missing Social Security or drivers’ license numbers. Which by law did not actually make those votes illegal in any way.

Military IDs do not have either of those numbers on them, for instance, and members of the military voting under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act are even explicitly told that they do not have to submit copies of ID, and there is no option on the military portal to do it. And it gets better, by which we mean worse! For those military voters, Griffin didn’t challenge all of them, just ones in four of the most Democratic counties. And, as Judge Myers noticed, he had no problem with any of the laws in the many months before the election, only after he became a losing loser. Because if you’re going to try to coup an election, why waste time with subtlety or shame?

Also, the numbers were not required when people registered before 2004, and also voters in North Carolina already must show ID to vote, and people are still legally entitled to vote without those numbers on their registrations if they show valid ID at the polls. And, by the way, even Griffin’s claim of missing numbers turned out to not be true. The Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central Universities has so far found 4,830 voters listed as having “incomplete” registrations whose registrations actually had those numbers.

And,

Among the 61,150 voters with allegedly “incomplete voter registrations,” young voters are 3.4 times more likely than voters over 65 to have their votes challenged. Young Black voters, meanwhile, are 5.28 times more likely to be challenged than white men over the age of 65.

If you suspect this is not a coincidence, you win a Moon Pie!

Cleta Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” had been employing something called “EagleAI” for more than a year before the election, targeting voter registrations to challenge. Though as it turns out, the guy who invented the program admitted to the AP last year that there is no AI involved at all: “The software instead draws in part from a database of ‘suspicious’ voters hand-built by conservative activists,” such as the people with “Hispanic-sounding last names” that Jim Womack, the leader of the North Carolina Election Integrity Network, told his group of volunteers to look for. Or people with addresses on college campuses, whom Mitchell has explicitly told strategists to target.

The whole skunk carcass should have been pitchforked into a ditch months ago, but last month a 2-1 opinion by a panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals sided with Griffin, and said that the burden should be on the legal voters to come forth within 15 days and prove that their vote was really really legal, and that all overseas voters who have never lived in the state should just get their votes thrown in the trash. Which would include people who came of voting age while serving in the military, or studying abroad, or missionaries, or their parents were, etc.

But hurray, the court has stepped in with a mop and bucket!

Riggs is awesome and fucking inspirational. Here she is talking to Marc Elias after that bullshit decision a few weeks ago.

“This does not just affect North Carolina. This is like dropping a match in a really dry forest, and if we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of Democracy.”

And for sure, if Mitchell and all the loser Republicans rejected by voters are allowed to get away with this playbook, you can bet your last can of snuff that they’ll be running it all over the country. A lot of that effort has already taken hold, to be sure. Many People Are Saying that voter suppression is how That Man won again, and you betcha Mitchell’s team of QAnon loons, Fox grandpas, incels, and rabid racists are already hard at work making their purge lists for the midterms. And, Big Daddy Opossum Wig is already trying to executive-order that DOGE and DHS get to comb through every state’s election rolls.

This voting-rights fight will continue, probably for the rest of our natural lives.

But maybe soon at least this chapter will be over!

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