State Certifies Final Legislative Contests
It’s finally official: The pro-polluter supermajority in the NC General Assembly has been broken in the State House of Representatives.
The NC State Board of Elections last week certified winners in the final three legislative contests which had been held up by recounts and protests. Those three contests were narrowly won by the Democratic candidates, including one which flipped control of a House seat from a Republican incumbent to his Democratic challenger. That provided 49 votes for Democrats in the House, just enough to deny the pro-polluter Republican leadership a veto-proof supermajority.
This gives Governor Stein substantially more leverage in negotiating with the legislative leadership over budgets and other legislation, so long as the 49 House Democrats hang together in upholding Stein’s vetoes.
Griffin’s Voter Disqualification Scam Continues
The effort by losing NC Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin to reverse his loss by retroactively disqualifying 60,000 voting citizens continued over the past week.
In the latest development, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit agreed on Friday afternoon to hear appeals on the case, and adopted an accelerated timetable for the case, setting oral arguments for January 27.
Earlier related actions took place in multiple arenas. First, a U.S. District Court Judge decided to return the case involving Griffin’s protests to state court in North Carolina. At that point, on a 4 to 2 vote, the NC Supreme Court issued an order blocking the State Board of Elections from certifying Justice Allison Riggs as the winner in her contest against Griffin until the case is heard in state court. At the same time, Justice Riggs and others appealed to the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the decision by District Court Judge Richard Meyers II to send the case to state court. She asked that the federal Court decide the matter before the NC Supreme Court hears the case in February.
“The voters are entitled to know that their votes matter; that the candidates they choose will assume the offices the voters chose them for, and that their votes cannot be thrown out by disappointed candidates seeking to retroactively gerrymander a win,” said the brief filed on Riggs’ behalf to the federal appeals court.
Not a Party-Line Vote
Significantly, the 4-2 vote by the NC Supreme Court to stay the State Board of Elections from certifying Riggs’ victory was not a party-line vote. Associate Justice Richard Dietz, a Republican, joined Associate Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, in voting against the stay. Justice Riggs recused herself from voting in the case since she has an obvious conflict of interest.
In his dissent, Justice Dietz said, “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. It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”
Also challenging the return of the case to the state court are the State Board of Elections, the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, and a number of individual voters whose right to have their 2024 votes counted is under attack by Griffin and his supporting groups from the Republican Party.
