Anisa Khalifa: Election Day in America was nearly three months ago. Since then, the thousands of winners, from senators to dog catchers, have entered office. Except for one.
Rusty Jacobs: This race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court is the last uncertified statewide race in the country.
Anisa Khalifa: Yep. A single spot on North Carolina's Supreme Court is still up in the air. The votes were counted and recounted weeks ago. And yet certifying the election remains in limbo.
Frank Bruni: It's crazy. When will we have an outcome and certainty on this election?
Anisa Khalifa: And the reasons behind this deadlock have turned some heads.
Frank Bruni: They're basically saying, even though we're bringing you no evidence that they don't have a right to vote, we want you to throw out their votes.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, how an election for a state supreme court seat signals a startling pattern in politics across the country.
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Rusty Jacobs: Testing, one, two, hello, hello.
Anisa Khalifa: All right. How's it going?
Rusty Jacobs: Hungry, hungry and tired, but it won't come through.
Anisa Khalifa: Rusty Jacobs is the voting and election integrity reporter at WNC. So needless to say, he's had a very busy few months.
Rusty Jacobs: But lately, all the attention has been focused on this state Supreme Court race.
瓜神app audio 1: And we still don't know who won the race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
瓜神app audio 2: Control of a seat on the North Carolina state Supreme Court is being held up in, well, the courts.
瓜神app audio 3: Justice Allison Riggs appears to have won, but her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin has sued. He's trying to get the ballot [audio fades down]
Anisa Khalifa: The story starts, as you might have guessed, on Election Day.
Rusty Jacobs: So at the end of election day, when results are not final, they're not official, Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate for this associate justice seat on the state Supreme Court, led his opponent, incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs, by 10, 000 votes.
Anisa Khalifa: But Rusty says it's important to remember that after Election Day is over,
Rusty Jacobs: That's not the end. That's not the end of the counting. There is a 10-day process that's always been in place. It's called the county canvas.
Anisa Khalifa: Those 10 days are when local election boards go through all the outstanding ballots, like absentee votes. It's a chance to make sure everything is in order.
Rusty Jacobs: Things are validated. Some ballots are, in fact, discarded when it's shown that the voter who cast it is not properly registered. But only after that painstaking process are the results final. And the results showed that Alison Riggs led Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes.
Anisa Khalifa: 734 votes. Now that's an incredibly slim margin. However, multiple recounts showed the same results.
Rusty Jacobs: But Jefferson Griffin challenged the legitimacy of more than 65, 000 ballots, as is his right to do so. And I'll say that his protests were first reviewed by local elections boards and the state elections board, and ultimately those protests were dismissed because there was no evidence of irregularities when it came to these ballots.
Anisa Khalifa: But Griffin said that wasn't good enough and took his challenge to the courts.
Rusty Jacobs: And that's where we are now, both in state court and federal court simultaneously.
Anisa Khalifa: So, which ballots is Griffin actually trying to toss out?
Rusty Jacobs: He's challenging three buckets of ballots. The first bucket, the one with the largest number of voters, he's challenging more than 60, 000 ballots, he says, were cast by by voters who were ineligible because of incomplete voter registrations.
Anisa Khalifa: Griffin argues these voters are ineligible because their registration is missing key information like part of their social security number or driver's license. But these people actually registered to vote a long time ago before that was a requirement.
Rusty Jacobs: The issue comes down to this subject of HAVA, the Help America Vote Act. It was passed in 2002. They would have to present a so called HAVA ID. It could be a utility bill, it could be some other document that confirms that this person is the person who they say they are.Their identity would have been confirmed long before this issue.
Anisa Khalifa: Okay, so that's bucket number one. The second bucket deals with voters in the military and overseas.
Rusty Jacobs: Federal law and the rules are clear that these voters are exempt from the state required photo ID law. Nonetheless, Jefferson Griffin has challenged these ballots cast by voters from four of the bluest counties in the state, only saying that because they didn't present photo ID, they should be invalidated. And he just simply chose ballots drawn from those counties only to say that these military and overseas voters should have their ballots cast discarded because they didn't present photo ID.
Anisa Khalifa: Lastly, Rusty says the third and final bucket is a small one.
Rusty Jacobs: And that's a few hundred voters that never resided in the state of North Carolina under state law are explicitly eligible to vote because they're related to people who are registered lawfully in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: Would it be accurate to say that it's an ideological challenge about the issue itself, but it's been framed as a legal challenge when the legality of these votes is not really in question?
Rusty Jacobs: I think that's exactly right. What's happening here is because these ballot protests are now in court, it gives it the veneer of legitimacy, right? Oh, well, you, you filed a lawsuit, so this must be a legitimate argument. What Jefferson Griffin is really challenging is the legitimacy of voters who have already been confirmed. He may have legitimate gripes or complaints about the way federal law and state law interact on this registration issue. But the proper forum for debating those things is say in the legislature where laws can be changed or laws can be tweaked, they could be amended, but not after lawful, legible voters have already cast their ballots.
Anisa Khalifa: Have you spoken with any voters whose ballots are actually being challenged?
Rusty Jacobs: I鈥檒l let you know, there's an editor at 瓜神app whose ballot has been challenged. So yes, I've spoken with that person because I've been supervised by that person. I'll say that I was watching a football conference championship recently, and one of the premiere ads during the broadcast of the football game was an ad by a political action group put together by Pat McCrory. Pat McCrory is the last Republican governor to serve in North Carolina. He is now part of this group whose aim is to truly bolster confidence and public trust in the elections administration. And that ad featured a Republican voter.
TV commercial audio: I voted Republican my whole life. Now politicians are trying to cancel my vote here in North Carolina. They say I'm on a list of 60, 000 voters.
Rusty Jacobs: So this is not the first time any of them voted, right? This is something they engage in to have their voices heard and suddenly the rugs being pulled out from under them.
Anisa Khalifa: So where does this case stand in the courts right now?
Rusty Jacobs: So the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the U. S. Fourth Circuit, they are debating whether to assert jurisdiction in the case. Jefferson Griffin wants the case to remain in state courts. One reason, he argues, is that this is a state election and that state rules and state law only applies. The state elections board is saying, 鈥楬ey, we're looking at the Help America Vote Act, federal law. We're looking at equal protection, right?鈥� We talked about ballots only from the four of the bluest counties in the state. Those are all federal laws implicated in Jefferson Griffin protests. the right jurisdiction for those questions is federal court. So I could clearly see the issue ultimately going to the U. S. Supreme Court by Griffin's challenge.
Anisa Khalifa: In your time as a politics reporter, have you ever seen anything like this?
Rusty Jacobs: Well, four years ago, there was an even closer race for the state Supreme Court in North Carolina. It was Cheri Beasley, the Democratic candidate who at the time was the incumbent chief justice, challenged by Paul Newby, who's now the chief justice, Justice Newby beat Cheri Beasley by 401 votes. Ultimately, there were recounts. There were election protests filed by Cheri Beasley. After the recounts confirmed there was no change. In fact, it was a widening of the gap in Paul Newby's favor. She abandoned those protests and conceded. And I was just reminded by a law professor that case was resolved in December of the year. So a month or so after the election, we are now in the new calendar year, well past the outcome of this election,
Anisa Khalifa: Do you think that if this continues to go on or if it happens again, this can undermine voters trust in the system and make them less willing to actually go and vote?
Rusty Jacobs: Well, it could, look, there is always an appetite for one message or another. It depends on whose message is heard the most. Jefferson Griffin at this point is maintaining his argument that election integrity is at risk because of the ballots he's challenging, but I think there's an increasing number of people from a much broader part of the political spectrum, Republican, unaffiliated Democrat who is saying this outcome is reliable. It was a close one, but we had one four years ago that was even closer. It's time to accept the outcome and move on. The central issue here is not just an issue for North Carolina. It's can you use the legitimacy of the courts to mask a win at all costs ethos when it comes to politics?
Anisa Khalifa: Rusty Jacobs is the voting and election integrity reporter at 瓜神app. He's been all over this story since it broke months ago. You can check out Rusty's reporting at a link in our show notes.
So is this race a one off or just the tip of an election's iceberg? Coming up, we look at the big picture and its potential impact on American democracy.
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Anisa Khalifa: After talking with Rusty about this unusual state Supreme Court race, I kept thinking, what happens next? I don't mean with this race specifically. Eventually, somebody will be declared a winner. But as a nation, where might these kinds of challenges lead us?
Frank Bruni: Where this leads is to a place where when you get a vote count, That is anything in the vicinity of close. You strategize with the people around you and you think, is there a way we can get ballots thrown out or get this recounted that privileges our candidate and gets us a win, no matter the integrity or the justice of that effort or that result? That's where this leads.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank Bruni is an author and longtime contributing writer to The New York Times. He's also a North Carolina resident.
Frank Bruni: And a professor at Duke University.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank has been reporting on and writing about politics for decades. Because of that, he's reluctant to call anything unprecedented.
Frank Bruni: And unique is a word I think in journalism you use at your peril, and it's almost always, ahistorical. Things take different forms and people have been trying to do suspect things with voting for a long time. But it's damn peculiar and it's not right.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank recently wrote a piece for The Times about this election and what it could signal for politics far beyond North Carolina's borders.
Frank Bruni: I think it is emblematic of what's going on politically, nationally, of the nature and the intensity of our partisan fights. You know, we saw in 2020, and then in early 2021, when we're talking about January 6th, we saw one of the presidential nominees of a major party, and in fact, the incumbent president at the time, deny the results of an election and try to overturn it.
I think it is very much the case that what we're seeing in this Supreme Court race in North Carolina is an echo of that, it's encouraged by that, it's modeled after that, and it tells us that we're in this very disturbing era where people will try to win or steal elections on whatever technicalities they can, with whatever ginned up arguments they can. Like we're past the point of something like proper political morality or proper political etiquette and we've entered something else and we've been ushered there by former and now current President Donald Trump and North Carolina is a microcosm of that.
Anisa Khalifa: You wrote in your piece that this dispute is particularly insidious. Can you expand on what you mean by that?
Frank Bruni: Yes, absolutely. So we've seen elections where people have claimed miscounts in the vote. We've seen elections contested because people believe that there was voter fraud, or at least feel like they can make an allegation along those lines. That's not what's happening with the Supreme Court election in North Carolina. You basically have the Republican who lost, according to multiple counts, by more than 730 votes. You have him saying, I can't point you to a fraudulent vote. I can't say that there was a campaign of like ballot harvesting. They're basically saying we believe certain voter registration forms are not filled out properly, do not exist in the archives properly likely as a result of administrative error, even though we're bringing you no evidence that they don't have a right to vote we want you to throw out their votes. But if you also look at the more than 5,000 military overseas votes that they're saying should be thrown out because those voters weren't required to produce photo ID, which is a new state requirement. These particular batches have clearly been selected because they lean Democratic, right? The 5,000 plus overseas votes that are being contested are only from four counties that are predominantly Democratic. Like those voters are connected, their registrations are connected with North Carolina counties that are predominantly democratic. The other counties are left out of this. You look at those details and this is clearly an effort to win this election however possible, it is not some pure and honorable attempt to make sure everything is as just as possible writ large. It's a scheme.
Anisa Khalifa: And this case isn't just getting attention in North Carolina. It's gotten increased national attention in recent weeks. Has there been anything about that national spotlight that's really stood out to you?
Frank Bruni: What surprises me about the national attention and what I think tells you that the national media correctly sees this as a warning and as an emblematic case, is that this is not an easy case to write about, right? In an era of culture war and clicks and I mean if there's a trend in media, it's to privileging stories that you can distill into two sentences that you can write a really sexy headline or headline equivalent for. This is actually, there are a lot of technicalities in this case. It's proceeding simultaneously in federal and state court, the Supreme Court is involved and on and on. So if you are a national assignment editor or a national reporter, you don't say, let me have some of that, that's really easy to write three quick paragraphs about, but they're writing about it nonetheless because they see how important it is.
Anisa Khalifa: Last year you published a book called 鈥淭he Age of Grievance,鈥� and in that book, you argue that our political culture has focused more and more on how people feel they've been wronged rather than searching for personal humility and collective common ground. How do you see North Carolina's state Supreme Court race fitting into this age of grievance?
Frank Bruni: Uh, it fits in entirely because the way that people who either support an effort like this or shrug at it. The way they justify that is they say, I, we have been so persecuted by the other side that if we have to get creative, if we have to get aggressive about making sure we control the Supreme Court as long as possible, um, that if we don't fight for ourselves, however possible, wrong will prevail and we will be wronged. And that is a posture of extreme and indiscriminate grievance.
Anisa Khalifa: As this challenge remains in the courts for review, what will you be paying attention to most?
Frank Bruni: I mean, I'm really just focused on the outcome. Um, I'll be interested to see if this actually gets its way all the way up to a higher court than a federal district court. And I'll be interested to see when and if this is resolved. Right now, this election is not certified. It's crazy. When will we have an outcome and certainty on this election? And if this becomes anything close to a norm, how do we have a functioning government? If we can't certify elections, if the legal challenges are so aggressive, so persistent, and maybe at some future moment, so pervasive, do we have all of these important seats of government vacant while various parties duke it out in court. I'm interested to see all of that.
Anisa Khalifa: Thank you so much, Frank.
Frank Bruni: Thank you.
Anisa Khalifa: If you'd like to read Frank Bruni鈥檚 piece on this race for The New York Times, check out our show notes. You can also find links to reporting from 瓜神app's Rusty Jacobs. This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond. It was edited by Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer.[
The Broadside is a production of 瓜神app and is part of the NPR Network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anissa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.