Sam Levine for The Guardian:
A disputed North Carolina state supreme court race that took nearly six months to resolve revealed a playbook for future candidates who lose elections to retroactively challenge votes, observers warn, but its ultimate resolution sent a signal that federal courts are unlikely to support an effort to overturn the results of an election….
Although the North Carolina state board of elections was not willing to entertain Griffin’s challenges in the future this time around, North Carolina Republicans wrestled control of the state elections board from Democrats, and might be more willing to entertain efforts to disenfranchise voters.
Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles said the episode sent “two conflicting signals, and it’s hard to know which one is going to dominate”.
On the one hand, he said Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which Republicans are “increasingly willing to believe” elections are being stolen and embrace efforts to overturn them.
“On the other hand, the fact that you have pushback, at least from the federal courts, should give some people pause,” he said.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said he believed the saga “closed the door” to similar challenges in the future.
“Certainly it is a shame that it took six months to get here, but the end result here is a reaffirmation of the fact that the federal courts aren’t going to stand for changing the rules for an election after it’s been run,” he said. “Will other people try this? Maybe. But I think the lesson that should be learned from this is actually this won’t work.”…
But Griffin’s efforts may have “only failed because the federal courts that oversee North Carolina happen to be free of partisan corruption”, Mark Stern, a legal reporter, wrote in Slate.
“But what if a Republican candidate loses by a hair in, say, Texas, where state and federal courts are badly tainted by GOP bias,” he wrote. “Griffin has laid out the blueprint for an election heist in such a scenario, with Scotus standing as the lone bulwark against an assault on democracy.”…