A panel of three judges of the North Carolina Court of Appeal ruled on Friday to deprive tens of thousands of voters during the elections of the Supreme Court of the State unless they can repair their ballots in 15 days.
The panel, made up of two Republican judges and a democratic judge, canceled the decision of a lower court which had protected the ballots and rejected the disputes filed by the republican candidate Jefferson Griffin.
The outgoing democrat judge Allison Riggs, whose Griffin victory challenged, said in a statement that she “will quickly attract this deeply poorly informed decision which threatens to favor more than 65,000 legitimate voters and establishes a dangerous precedent, allowing disappointed politicians to throw the will of the people.”
“The North Carolinians elected me to keep my seat and I swore an oath to the Constitution and the rule of law – so I will continue to defend the rights of the voters of this State and to obstruct those who would take the power of the people,” said Riggs.
The decision is the last development of the current legal saga on the Court of the Supreme Court of the State between Riggs and the judge of the Court of Appeal, Jefferson Griffin. Griffin lost the elections, but the race was close enough to have challenged the results. Even after two stories, Riggs has always won, but Griffin brought several prosecution in response.
At the heart of the question is the decision of the Council of State for the elections of the North Carolina to have some 60,000 voting bulletins by voters with allegedly incomplete registrations, as well as several thousand voting bulletins by foreign voters who have not provided their photo identity document with their absent voting bulletins or by foreign voters who have never resisted in North Carolina.
According to the decision of the Court of Appeal, the approximately 60,000 voters with registrations of incomplete voters will be given 15 days to repair their voting bulletins, as are military and abroad which have not provided an appropriate photo identity document. The voting bulletins of the Northern Carolina residents who live abroad but who have never lived in the state will not be counted.
One of the judges of the GOP of the majority of the decision, judge Fred Gore, led a “joint campaign” with Griffin and other candidates of the GOP Court of Appeal in 2020. It was the first time that the judges campaigned together on a party platform.
“Changing the rules by which these legitimate voters took part in our electoral process after the elections to reject their votes otherwise valid in order to modify the outcome of a single race among many ballots are directly contrary to the law, equity and constitution,” wrote Democrat Judge Toby Hampson in a long dissent.
The case will then go to the Supreme Court of the State, on which the Republicans will maintain a majority 5-2. However, Judge Riggs has challenged the protest, so only six judges would hear the appeal, which could lead to a 3-3 decision.
“The court has not launched 65,000 voting bulletins, but that forces all these voters to jump through more hoops for their vote to be counted,” said Billy Corrihe, the director of state courts for the popular parity project and a contributor to the democracy file, in an article on social media. “None of these voters violated the rules.”
The specialist in elections law, Rick Hasen, said that Friday’s decision could also lead to a revival of the federal case on the elections. “For me, it has remedies (sic) of Roe c. Alabama, where a state court seemed to violate the regular procedure in the modification of the rules for an election of state after the fact,” Hasen wrote online. “State courts could violate federal law by favoring voters in this way.”
Anderson Clayton, president of the Northern Carolina Democratic Party, said in a social media position that the court had indeed deprived “voters of last year elections”.
“The Northern Carolina Democrats will fight this decision,” added Clayton. “But are not mistaken, the bench of the State Court of Appeal has curled up to political pressures and corruption of their own party. The NCGOP and the RNC are trying to steal an election and to test the waters for the future refusal of the elections.”
It’s a story in development …
