Well zippadeedoodah, after six long months of papering about every courthouse in the state trying to get somebody to let him steal a North Carolina state supreme court seat he lost, Jefferson “Davis” Griffin has seen the writing on the outhouse wall and conceded, a day after a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the State Elections Board to certify Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs as the winner. And the State Board of Elections will reportedly issue a certificate of election to Allison Riggs next Tuesday, zipidee-yay!
Nice Time! Federal Judge Tells North Carolina To Certify That Danged Supreme Court Election Already!
Riggs released a statement:
After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes, thousands of volunteers mobilized, hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day. It’s been my honor to lead this fight — even though it should never have happened — and I’m in awe of the North Carolinians whose courage reminds us all that we can use our voices to hold accountable any politician who seeks to take power out of the hands of the people.
No, it never fucking should have, no court at any level should have indulged Griffin after three recounts showed he lost, without one scintilla of evidence of any kind of fraud, much less two courts being open to retroactively changing the rules and throwing out thousands of completely lawfully cast votes. And the taxpayers had to pay for it!
Here’s Riggs yesterday being excellent, talking about how pernicious it is that election deniers are burrowed in like chiggers in the state courts.
Griffin, as Republicans are wont to do, still frames it a win.
“This effort has always been about upholding the rule of law and making sure that every legal vote in an election is counted,” said the judge who tried to throw out 68,000-something votes of veterans, students, taxpayers, etc., because everything out a Republican piehole is more projection than Gone With The Wind.
The state supreme court will still have a 5-2 Republican majority, but every little bit helps, especially with redistricting coming up in 2030. And there’s no denying that even with all of the monkeyshines from Cleta Mitchell and her vote-cancelling jug band, the Republicans lost big in North Carolina in November. Trump did win the state, but Democrats dominated the rest of the way down the ballot: Voters rejected king of Nude Africa Mark Robinson for governor and QAnon freaknut Michele Morrow as school superintendent, and took away the Republicans’ supermajority.
Nice Time! Federal Judge Tells North Carolina To Certify That Danged Supreme Court Election Already!
That whupped them into a power-extinction tizzy, and they used their supermajority power left in their last days to ram through a bill that they secretly wrote in the dead of night and pretended was about hurricane relief, but was actually stripping the governor of powers like appointing state supreme court judges and members of the State Board of Elections, and removing the seats of two county superior court judges who ruled against election-law changes.
That’s the song of the South, the old boys grabbing up what they can, and everybody else getting scraps from the low end of the hog. That’s their tunebook, fiddle off a reel about being a victim, sue, drag their opponents through the courts, and hope to get lucky with some kind of Aileen Cannon, or if not, at least exhaust and bleed their opponents like a hound dog chasing a varmint through the woods.
MAGAs have now appointed themselves to the election board, so we can all expect the vote-stealing hijinks to continue.
But Democracy has lived, for today!
OPEN THREAD.
[AP]
