Voters 'in disbelief' at NC GOP candidate’s 'concentrated effort to strip' people of votes
North Carolina, once considered deep red, showed how much of a swing state it has become in the 2024 election. Now-President Donald Trump defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by roughly 3.2 percent in North Carolina, but the state's residents also voted to replace a term-limited Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, with another Democrat: now-Gov. Josh Stein.
North Carolina isn't as Democratic-friendly as Virginia, which Harris carried by 6 percent. But it is a better state for Democrats than Florida, a state Trump carried by 13 percent.
Another North Carolina race that was close in 2024 was a state supreme court race, which found incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs narrowly defeating GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin. But Griffin and his allies are fighting to overturn the election results by throwing out more than 65,000 votes on technicalities — an effort that, many North Carolina Democrats allege, is comparable to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
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Salon's Tatyana Tandanpolie, in an article published on February 4, describes the anger of North Carolina residents who voted for Riggs and believe that Republicans are trying to invalidate their votes for frivolous reasons.
"In his complaint," Tandanpolie explains, "Griffin accused the North Carolina Board of Elections of erroneously counting more than 65,000 votes that he claims are invalid for three different reasons. Some 60,000 of those votes, he claims, came from voters who did not provide driver's license information or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers on their voter registration applications; in some cases voters were not asked to provide that information."
The Salon reporter adds, "Around 5500 contested votes are absentee ballots from voters overseas registered to vote in four Democrat-leaning counties, who Griffin alleged failed to include photo identification with their absentee ballots."
Louis Caldera, who served as secretary of the U.S. Army under President Bill Clinton, is a scathing critic of Griffin's efforts.
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Caldera told Salon, "It's just fundamentally unfair to try to change the voting rules after the fact. These voters followed the rules that they were told they had to comply with to have their votes counted. It's particularly egregious to target the votes of many overseas military voters, but only in four of the state's 100 counties, for clearly partisan reasons. That kind of gamesmanship is what breeds cynicism about our electoral process."
One of the North Carolina residents whose vote is being challenged is Copland Rudolph of Asheville. Rudolph considers Griffin's action as "coordinated, concentrated effort to strip people of their voting rights."
Rudolph told Salon, "What is exhausting and infuriating is that someone who wants to show up as a public servant, allegedly, could then, in his own actions, create such unnecessary chaos for his own self-needs. I mean, it's even more reasons why the majority of North Carolinians didn't vote for him."
Another North Carolina voter who is speaking out, Spring Dawson-McClure, told Salon, "I'm frustrated. I'm in disbelief that this is actually happening these days."
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