North Carolina Supreme Court Pauses Election Certification To Consider Handing Election To Loser Judge
This is how democracy dies: very slowly, and then very fast.
It’s a tough contest for who’s the most making-shit-up-judges out there these days, but for your consideration, four Republicans on the North Carolina state supreme court who’ve decided to give real, actual consideration to throwing out more than 60,000 legitimate votes like so many Cheerwine cans onto I-40, and handing a state supreme court seat to the losing Republican candidate, based on ZERO evidence that any kind of fraud happened.
Yes, judges, who unlike some kind of Kari Lake-type idiots cannot pretend they have no idea how the law works.
Way back in November, Judge Jefferson Griffin lost the election for a state supreme court seat to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, and that election should be considered decided. The votes have been recounted, and hand-recounted, and Riggs won, by 734 votes out of 5.5 million. But in typical Republican fashion, Griffin refuses to accept that he’s a losing loser who lost.
Instead he kudzu’d lawsuits all over 100 North Carolina counties, and petitioned the state Elections Board in December to not count votes. The Elections Board and all the other courts told him to go suck a MoonPie, as well they should have. And then he asked the state supreme court — the one he hopes to join— for a stay on certifying the election, and incredibly, those chicken-fried chucklefucks have now given it to him. Again, he’s got no evidence of anything but that a slim majority of voters find him less appealing than a stale pork rind at the bottom of the pocket of a wet pair of britches. But he’s demanding that they retroactively change the law to give him the seat anyway! Hey, what about the other races that have been certified that might be affected by those ballots? Fuckit, that ain’t none of his concern!
The North Carolina election-stealers have been plotting their game for a long time, with the help of Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, naturally. All the way back in July, members of their state chapter all got on the horn together to cook up what conspiracies they might could push. Could they throw voters off of the rolls if their registrations were missing their driver’s license and Social Security information? Even the leader of the group, Jim Womack, thought that would not fly.
“That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.” He added later, “That’s considered to be voter suppression, and there’s no way a court is going to find that way.”
And that’s coming from the guy who told the group “Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is a suspicious voter.”
PREVIOUSLY!
Could they harass the Elections Board with a firehose of information requests? They tried! Self-described “Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier” Carol Snow deluged the board with requests for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, yet she was unable to find one single illegitimate registration.
In October the group sued the state Board of Elections to try to get 225,000 voters thrown off the rolls, and even a Trump-appointed judge told them to kick rocks.
Griffin also filed an attachment-heavy 4,007-page complaint with the US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, but a Trump-appointed judge there said there was no federal issue and sent it back to the state supreme court.
The theory that Griffin’s clucking wet-hen mad about this time is that the law changed to require ID and the last four digits of their Social Security number at the polls, but people who registered before then didn’t have to show those things. The law wasn’t retroactive, but they are all ILLEGAL VOTERS, he has decided. And the absentee ballots too! The state Elections Board “has been breaking our election laws for decades,” and he could practically swoon, fetch the fainting couch! Those were not illegal votes, which a judge full well knows. But Republicans have rubbed “unseemly” out of their dictionaries.
Just listen to these ridiculous dramatics: “This lawlessness was brought to the Board’s attention back in 2023, before the 2024 general election, but the Board refused to correct its errors,” his attorneys clucked. “Now those chickens have come home to roost.” Okay, there, Malcolm X.
The chickens already went home and got plucked, battered and fried. Republicans lost almost every single statewide election they ran in in November, with candidates like wannabe governor Mark “Nude Africa” Robinson and wannabe school superintendent/ QAnon weirdo/ Jim Carrey conspiracy theorist Michele Morrow. Candidates about as popular as outhouse skunks! But finding not-awful candidates to sell their wildly unpopular platforms is apparently so difficult for the state party that they’ve poured nearly every cc of their oil since 2016 into gerrydiddling and stripping Democrats of power by whatever means they can.
The court is already five Republicans (and two Democrats), and Griffin would like to make himself the sixth, so handing it to him wouldn’t change the balance of power. But it sure would be a mighty letting down of the trapdoor on the long johns of justice, and a full moon to everybody’s face. And a flag to red states everywhere, maybe you can get away with it too.
[ProPublica/ CBS/ Jefferson Griffin v. North Carolina Board of Elections]
Either you invalidate every vote for every race on those ballots, or you tell this dipshit to go take a long walk off a short pier. There is no option “C” here.
This is Calvinball shit. They literally are making up the rules as they go along.