1/6 in robes
By 
North Carolina Republicans are steadfastly opposed to democracy even by the standards of Republicans in 2025, and this is one of their lowest points:
North Carolina’s top court cleared the way for some voters’ ballots in a contested state Supreme Court race to be tossed months after the election, opening a path for Republican Jefferson Griffin to potentially overturn an apparent narrow loss.
However, the extraordinary decision from the Republican-controlled court — which drew angry rebukes from Democrats and a sitting GOP justice in the state — still may see more litigation in federal court.
Griffin, a state appellate judge, has for months been challenging his apparent loss to incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs in November, in which Griffin finished fewer than 1,000 votes behind. But after his loss, Griffin argued that roughly 65,000 votes in the state were improperly cast and should be thrown out.
Griffin argued three categories of votes should be tossed: Voters who were registered to vote with incomplete voter registration data; military and overseas voters who did not meet the state’s voter ID requirements; and overseas voters who have never lived in the state or expressed an intent to do so, a small category of voters who are generally family members of expats or service members.
Tossing out wide swaths of ballots after the election would be a near-unprecedented decision that voting rights groups, Democrats and even some Republicans condemned as violating voters’ due process rights and changing the rules of an election after it has already been run.
And it’s not just that they’re throwing out ballots that were unquestionably legally cast under the rules in place on Election Day, but doing so only for a small number of heavily Democratic counties.
Justice Earls filed the kind of dissent somebody should have filed in Bush v. Gore, and as she explains this just reflects the longstanding theory of North Carolina Republicans that voters have no businesses determining who wins elections:
Speaking of Bush v. Gore, I’m old enough to remember that even the quickly abandoned possibility that military ballots could be disqualified caused the nation’s political press to completely lose their collective shit.
I can’t put it more eloquently than that. I hope 4CA is paying attention.