It may be an outside possibility, but the ghosts of a contested election for school superintendent in 2004 could haunt this year’s gubernatorial race, allowing the Republican-led legislature to settle the contest between Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general.
Over the weekend, several political operatives and others with interest in the election began circulating a 2007 article by Robert Joyce of the University of North Carolina School of Government. That article recapped the 2004 contest between June Atkinson, a Democrat, and Bill Fletcher, a Republican, and sketched out the process that eventually allowed the General Assembly to decide the race.
The question now becomes whether the same process, created by a legislature controlled by Democrats, could be used to put the governor’s race in the hands of Republican lawmakers.