Judge Griffin’s protest includes two arguments against counting a few thousand ballots cast by overseas voters that one Republican justice said this week may have merit. But its centerpiece is a claim that some 60,000 voters in the Supreme Court election failed to list a required proof of identity — either the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number — when they originally registered, as long as two decades ago.
Although the omissions stemmed from a mistake in preparing the registration forms, he has argued, it leaves the voters’ eligibility in question, and their ballots should be thrown out unless they provide legitimate numbers within a limited correction period set by the state.
Questions about those omissions had spread in conservative circles for more than a year, and were teed up for use by Republican political strategists well before Judge Griffin’s November loss.
A conservative election integrity advocate, Carol Snow, analyzed state election records in 2023. She complained to the State Board of Elections that December that some 225,000 registrations over the past two decades had incorrectly omitted legally required driver’s license or Social Security numbers.
The state and national Republican Parties made political use of her complaint in a lawsuit filed last summer, which sought to strike inaccurately registered voters from the North Carolina rolls. In an email exchange, Ms. Snow said that party officials asked for her help on the issue, but that the request never led to a collaboration.
That suit was one of a flurry of court actions that the political parties filed before the election, apparently because lawsuits that are filed after the fact — for example, after an election loss — are regularly dismissed if the issue at stake could have been raised earlier.
“The timing of these suits suggests the Republicans were looking at issues they thought were questionable and getting their markers set in case an election turned out like this one,” said Mitch Kokai, the senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.
In this case, the argument that thousands of voters were illegally registered was ready for use not just by Judge Griffin, but by Donald Trump or any other Republican who might have suffered a close election loss in the state. In fact, three G.O.P. state legislators who narrowly lost their races also protested the results….
Here’s what’s going on: An incumbent Democratic Supreme Court justice, Allison Riggs, won her race by 734 votes. With about 5.5 million votes cast, that’s as narrow as it gets, but she won. Lots of recounts confirmed it. It’s done.
Except… the North Carolina GOP planted a backup plan in the system: a “zombie lawsuit” challenging the eligibility of certain voters who, per The New York Times, “unknowingly registered, sometimes years or decades ago, using erroneous forms that did not clearly require applicants to provide the last four digits of a driver’s license or a Social Security number as proof of identity.”
To stress: These are legitimate voters who were just given a bad form at some point. There’s even good reason to believe that many did in fact provide this information, but it was simply not included in the records because of clerical error. Plus, the vast majority of them would have provided proof of identity, like their driver’s license, when they actually voted.
Crucially, the RNC and North Carolina GOP made no effort to expedite their lawsuit and get a resolution before November 5th. Like all zombie lawsuits, this was strategically timed not to change the election rules or challenge voter eligibility before the election — but rather to create a lever for throwing out results if the election-deniers’ preferred candidates lost….