How to fight

Allison Riggs offers some lessons about how to fight against injustice.

Everybody who wants Democrats to fight more should tune into Allison Riggs and her battle for her Supreme Court seat. She's taking on the Republican Party and winning, even if the slog is long and slow. It’s not a sexy battle with any sort of dramatic denouement, but she is on pace to beat back an assault on voting rights and democracy. If she’s successful, she will deliver a rare win against the creeping authoritarianism that’s infected North Carolina since Republicans won control of the legislature in 2011.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled against Jefferson Griffin and the GOP’s attempt to disenfranchise more than 60,000 voters who had missing identification information on their voter registration forms. However, they allowed Griffin’s challenge to military voters who were told they did not need a voter identification to cast a ballot. The court gave those service members serving overseas 30 days to cure their ballots by providing a copy of an ID or an exemption form. They also disqualified the votes of people who do have never lived in the US but are citizens and whose parents were registered to vote in North Carolina before leaving the country.

The State Board of Elections has ruled that only military and overseas ballots from Guilford County can be contested. Griffin and the GOP did not file their complaints before the deadline in the other Democratic counties they wanted to contest. That Republicans only wanted ballots in Democratic counties tossed out gives away the whole game. It’s clearly not about election integrity or they would have contested the whole state. No, it was about changing the rules for only certain voters after the fact to steal an election.

According reporter Bryan Anderson, who has been on the case from the beginning, Riggs will likely win, but her margin will shrink. Riggs has appealed to the federal courts, arguing that the military ballots should all count. The case could end up at the Supreme Court, even though she could win based on the state court ruling.

Riggs has waged the type of battle the Democrats need to fight going forward. She defined the terms of the debate. She raised the money to fund the lawsuit. She built a coalition that kept the story in the news. She used rallies and protests strategically, with enough to build support but not so many that they had diminishing returns. Most of all, she made the case about the voters, not her.

Republicans tried to use their tired argument that they were ensuring election integrity, but Riggs and her allies swatted that argument away. Even conservative commentators had trouble justifying the actions of Griffin and GOP since they were cherry-picking voters to cancel. Most Republican elected officials stayed quiet, hoping for a win in the courts but not supporting Griffin’s challenge openly.

Riggs kept the debate about disenfranchising voters instead of focusing on winning the election. Riggs is taking the case to federal court in defense of military voters. The Republican justices are going to have to defend voting to disqualify the votes of people serving their country overseas. Politically, Riggs and her allies are in pretty good place with as many veterans and active-duty service members as there are in North Carolina.

Riggs has a righteous fight. Democrats have more of them. The case of immigrants being shipped to a gulag is one. Democrats should take some lessons from Riggs.

Democrats should resist making deportation the issue and not try to create any martyrs. The fight is over the rule of law and Constitution, just as Riggs made her dispute about the voters, not just the outcome of the election. The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to return somebody that ICE picked up by mistake. He should be returned because he deserves due process. So does everybody else.

Republicans are attacking the character of the man the Court ruled should be returned. Democrats shouldn’t let them make the fight about him. They should stay focused on the goal—ending a policy that violates the Constitution and denies due process. Make the argument about rights, not deportations. Everybody deserves due process and polls indicate the vast majority of the country agrees.

We’re in the very early stages of an authoritarian regime trying to consolidate power. We are going to have a lot of battles over our rights and we need to use our institutions as long as they are still standing. We also need to frame the terms of the debate. Make them broad, not narrow. Defend the Constitution and the rule of law, not one person or another. Moral clarity is key to winning. So is public support.