"I'm in disbelief that this is actually happening": GOP election denial hits North Carolina voters

About three weeks after last November's election, Spring Dawson-McClure received an unassuming postcard from the North Carolina GOP informing her that her ballot "may be affected" by the party's litigation. The notice, blank on one side, featured a QR code that directed her to the state Republican Party's website, where she found her name on a list of voters declared ineligible because their voter registration applications did not have required identification information.

She was annoyed, the 48-year-old Hillsborough resident told Salon, first by having to take time to verify with the Orange County board of elections that her voter registration was, in fact, complete and then with the idea her vote had been challenged at all. The North Carolina native said she has voted in 19 of the state's elections since 2012 and never had any problems before this election cycle.

The challenge came after Appellate Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, sought to challenge his electoral defeat, twice confirmed with recounts, to incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs in the state's Supreme Court race. Griffin trails Riggs, a Democrat, by just 734 votes out of some 5.5 million cast. He sued the North Carolina Board of Elections in the state Supreme Court in December after it rejected his election protests, asking the court to force the board to toss out tens of thousands of ballots he alleges are invalid under state law.

Post card notice from the North Carolina Republican Party (Courtesy of Spring Dawson-McClure)

As Dawson-McClure learned more about Griffin's escalating election protests and their movement through state and federal court, she said she grew angry — then scared. 

"Once I understood that women and people of color are disproportionately represented on the list, as it bounced back and forth from one court to the next, [I got] angry. I'm frustrated. I'm in disbelief that this is actually happening these days," she recalled in a phone interview.

Dawson-McClure is one of more than 65,000 North Carolina voters who have had their votes swept up and called into question in the legal contention over the state's hot-button Supreme Court race. As Griffin's challenge drags on in court, North Carolina voters told Salon they fear their votes will be thrown out — and what that means for democracy in a state where it's already eroded.   

"I just feel incredibly heavy about the state of our democracy, and it feels like a very real possibility that we will no longer have free and fair elections in North Carolina," said Dawson-McClure, who matched her registration with her Social Security number earlier this month. An Orange County election board staff member told her they suspected that process initially failed because her last name is now hyphenated.

The broad scope of Griffin's protest means that a number of North Carolinians have had their votes contested — or at least know someone who has — Riggs' parents included. While military service members stationed overseas have had their votes directly challenged by Griffin's protest of absentee ballots, the Raleigh News & Observer reported that women and people of color are also disproportionately represented on the list of alleged ineligible voters.

In his complaint, 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.

Around 5,500 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. In a brief filed Wednesday, Griffin identified a crop of just over 500 votes he says came from voters who never physically resided in the state, which includes children of military service members stationed overseas who were last eligible to vote in North Carolina. The part of the state law that covers those voters' right to cast a ballot in North Carolina elections, he argues, violates the state constitution. 

In a brief filed Wednesday, Griffin argued that throwing out the overseas votes alone would win hand him the race. But such a move, Riggs and other critics have previously argued, would unfairly disenfranchise uniformed service members.

"The petition is really eye-opening, and basically says that winning a partisan election is apparently so important that the candidate who was behind after all the votes were counted would be willing to deny the fundamental right to vote of our nation’s finest — men and women in uniform serving overseas who are prepared to die to defend our country and their immediate family members — in order to make up his deficit in the vote count," said Louis Caldera, former U.S. secretary of the army during the Clinton administration.

Organizations representing military voters have told Caldera that their clients are "deeply frustrated" their votes have been retroactively contested when they lawfully cast ballots under North Carolina's election rules, which the North Carolina Rules Review Commission unanimously approved last March. Part of that frustration, he added, stems from the fact they can't be present themselves to "fight for their votes to be counted" precisely because they're serving the country overseas. 

"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," Caldera said in a statement. "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."

The state Elections Board rejected Griffin's claims in December,  which prompted him to file suit in the North Carolina Supreme Court. 

The state Supreme Court dismissed his petition last week in a surprise ruling but maintained the pause it put on election certification earlier this month. It sent the case back to the Wake County Superior Court, which will begin hearing the case on Feb. 7. 

Still, the North Carolina Supreme Court's dismissal didn't deal Griffin much of a blow. Three of the five GOP justices on the bench appeared to signal an embrace of his arguments against counting thousands of votes in concurring opinions, offering a glimpse into their possible approaches if and when the challenge returns to the state's highest court.

Neither the Griffin campaign nor a spokesperson for the North Carolina GOP responded to a request for comment. Griffin has previously said that he can't comment on his legal challenge, citing judicial ethics. 

Copland Rudolph, an Asheville resident who's voted in 14 elections since 2012, told Salon that she first learned of her inclusion on a North Carolina GOP list of allegedly ineligible voters just 10 days after voting early in October. A friend who works with the nonpartisan watchdog Protect Democracy saw her name on the list and alerted her. The challenge to her vote came while she and her community worked to recover from the devastating hurricane that struck the state in September, adding another layer of difficulty to an already tumultuous time.

"I thought, 'This is western North Carolina recovering from a hurricane. Clearly, they're not going to try to throw away thousands of votes in Buncombe County. I mean, we voted in record numbers despite all that we were dealing with here,'" the 57-year-old recalled thinking after the election. She soon became furious that a politician would be "so tone deaf" as to challenge their votes instead of helping the community recover, she said.

Griffin's electoral challenge followed the Republican National Committee and North Carolina GOP trying in August — and later failing — to have 225,000 North Carolinians purged from the voter rolls over incomplete registrations in state court. A federal court dismissed the claim in October.

Rudolph said her vote was included in that cohort of alleged ineligible voters the RNC identified, despite learning later that her voter registration application included her Social Security number. She suspects that the database the GOP used to generate the list flagged her application as incomplete because she goes by her middle name rather than her first name, Susan. 

"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," she said. "I mean, it's even more reasons why the majority of North Carolinians didn't vote for him."

Rudolph joined Dawson-McClure, four other North Carolina women and the League of Women Voters of North Carolina earlier this month in filing an amicus brief to the district court that considered the North Carolina Board of Election's request to move the case to federal court, opposing Griffin's election protests and request for a pause on election certification. The district court ultimately ruled to remand the case back to the state Supreme Court. Following an appeal of that decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is now deciding whether to bring it back to federal court. 

While Dawson-McClure said she's hopeful the courts will decide to count North Carolinians' votes — she also worries about the state Supreme Court making a decision about its own membership should Griffin's petition return to the court. 

"I would not have said this a couple of months ago, but I don't have confidence in our judges, based on what I'm hearing in North Carolina," she said, adding: "It just feels clear at this point that they're not impartial, that they're not holding the state and federal Constitution at the heart of their decision making. It seems incredibly political."

Rudolph felt similarly. She argued that Griffin's election challenge is part of a "coordinated, concentrated effort to strip people of their voting rights," ultimately designed to "escalate" and "unfold" in other parts of the country. 

"When these kinds of things happen, it reinforces some people's belief [that] 'my vote doesn't matter,' and we know that it matters," she added. "This contest was decided by less than 800 people. Votes matter. It really, really matters, and it's worth fighting for."