Undermining elections

Republicans have been trying to rig elections in North Carolina for 15 years so why should we think the current election bill would do anything different.

NC House Speaker Destin Hall

I’m going to write this one more time. State Auditor Dave Boliek had an opportunity to build confidence in our elections and prove his critics wrong. He didn’t. Instead, he hired partisan operatives to oversee our elections. He’s put pressure on local boards of election to bend to his will to make voting more difficult for students. So forgive Democrats for being skeptical of the election bill moving through the legislature right now.

Republicans have been obsessed with voter fraud ever since Barack Obama got elected. They just could not believe that many white people would vote for a Black man to become president. It must be fraud. They’ve been trying to undermine elections ever since.

In North Carolina, Republicans passed the “Monster” voter suppression bill in 2013 that was struck down by the courts for targeting minorities with “surgical precision.” The legislators researched which methods of voting African Americans used and which kinds of IDs they likely held and then tried to ban them. The hyper-conservative US Supreme Court wouldn’t even take up the case on appeal, so you know it was bad.

In 2016, incumbent Governor Pat McCrory cried voter fraud when he lost to Roy Cooper. He claimed felons and people from out of state were voting in the election. After review of the fraud claims, McCrory’s own State Board of Elections found fewer than 30 ballots were cast illegally. To put that in perspective, 4.8 million North Carolinians voted in a state with 100 counties. That means only 0.000625 percent of the ballots were bad. We should be celebrating the security of our elections, not fretting over their credibility.

Not Republicans. They continued to cry voter fraud to undermine our elections.

Then, in 2018, North Carolina had a real case of election fraud, but it wasn’t the Democrats. It was the Republicans. Republican Congressional candidate Mark Harris hired a man in Bladen County who used ballot harvesting, turning in fraudulent mail-in ballots to give Harris a win in the county. The election was nullified but six years later, Harris won a gerrymandered seat in Congress because, you know, Republicans don’t really care about voter fraud.

In 2020, the voter fraud and stolen election mantra had been picked up by the President of the United States. Donald Trump signaled what would happen if he lost, telling reporters he might not accept the outcome. So when the election didn’t go his way, he sent his followers to attack the Capitol in an effort to stay in power. Republicans across the spectrum continue to cast doubt about the election to keep Trump happy and justify moves to rig elections.

Then, in 2024, Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin tried to change the rules of the election after it was over to steal the seat from Supreme Court Justice Alison Riggs. He was almost successful. After several rejections, the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court sided with him. It took a Trump-appointed federal judge to protect our democracy from Republicans when he wrote, “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.”

And while the state was focused on Griffin’s outrageous claims, the legislature was removing control of the state board of elections from the governor’s office and giving it to the state auditor. A previous Supreme Court had rejected the move just a few years earlier and the voters had rejected a constitutional amendment that would have stripped control from the governor.

So when incoming Auditor Dave Boliek had the chance to prove Democrats’ claims wrong, he took a pass and reinforced the notion that it was a partisan move. Boliek appointed former GOP Congressional candidate Francis X. De Luca, who had overseen independent expenditure campaigns against Democrats, as chair of the board and former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party Dallas Woodhouse as liaison to the county boards of elections. You can’t make this stuff up.

House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Disappointment) calls opposition to the current bill “performative outrage” and says the GOP has “been very public about wanting secure elections,” but the only people threatening our elections are Republicans. They have cynically used voter fraud to cast doubt on safe elections in order to undermine those same elections. They support a president and administration that tried to overthrow the government. They’ve been using election law and redistricting to make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections in North Carolina for fifteen years. Nothing they’ve done since they took power in 2011 indicates they are interested in free and fair elections. I don’t know why that would change now.