The unprecedented GOP attempt to overturn a Democratic victory in a North Carolina State Supreme Court race suffered a major setback Monday night at the hands of a stalwart conservative judge who was appointed by Donald Trump.
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In a lengthy ruling, federal district court Judge Richard Myers rejected the effort by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin to throw out thousands of votes. Myers ordered the state board of election to certify Democrat Allison Riggs’ 734-vote victory.
On April 11, six months after the election, the Republican-dominated state supreme court—still short-handed from the contested election—had green-lit Griffin’s attempt to invalidate enough ballots from overseas and military voters to potentially reverse Riggs’ victory. Democratic Justice Anita Earls called that decision “a bloodless coup.”
On Monday, Myers overruled the state Supreme Court’s decision. “This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals,” he wrote. “This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible. To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”
Myers found that the state court decisions agreeing with Griffin’s legal challenges would violate “the equal protection and substantive due process rights of overseas military and civilian voters.” He prominently cited Bush v. Gore, the landmark 2000 case in which the US Supreme Court found that a manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated voters’ rights to equal protection under the law because it only applied to three large, Democratic-leaning counties.
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Author: Ari Berman
Ari Berman is Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent. He’s the author of the new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, as well as Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
