A grassroots group and many of the lawful voters whose votes are being questioned will gather in the cold to read each name.
Temperatures before dawn on Tuesday are expected to fall below 30 degrees in Raleigh, a data point you might assume has nothing to do with Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to erase 60,000 votes so that he can win the state supreme court election he lost in November.
You’d be wrong, says Kate Barr, a voting rights advocate.
Barr will lead a group of those voters to the grounds outside the North Carolina Supreme Court Tuesday morning, and, before the sun rises, start to read the name of each and every one of those voters.
“It will be dark and it’s going to be really freaking cold,” Barr said in an interview last week.
Reading every name will help give a sense of scale to Griffin’s target, Barr said: It will take some 17 hours, from before dawn to just before midnight, to get through them all.
Griffin, a Republican appellate court judge, lost the state supreme court election to Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes, but Griffin has asked the state supreme court and its Republican majority to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters based on a discredited legal argument that seeks to discard voter registrations that have incomplete information in the state voter database.
There are more valid reasons for that information to be missing than there are nefarious reasons, however, and the vast majority of these contested voters are likely eligible voters who have been voting without issue for years.
“My inbox is full of dozens and dozens of challenged voters who are outraged, devastated, and confused,” Barr said. “They want to go and fix whatever the problem is so their vote can count and there’s nothing they can do and that feels really awful and like it is, it has brought me to tears on more than a few occasions.”
Griffin and the state Republican party, she said “are attempting to steal an election. I don’t know any other way to put it.”
Barr had been searching for a way to do something about it, she said, and finally settled on simple and to the point.
There will be no pontificating politicians, Barr said, just names and some statements from voters who can’t get there in person.
“I wish I could make this sound more planned than it is,” Barr said. “We thought of it Wednesday morning, honestly.”
The idea might be new, but the anger behind it has been festering since Griffin hinted he would try to invalidate the ballots of rightful voters, Barr said.
“We’ve been trying to come up with some kind of way to help people understand just how many human beings are being affected. And there are so many voters who are even now just learning that their vote is being challenged.”
The reading is a call to action and a public service, she said.
“Folks can go listen to just the segment of their county and see if they’re on the list, but it’s also about physically representing how many people are being disenfranchised by Jefferson Griffin’s shenanigans,” Barr said.
She plans to arrive outside the court at 5 a.m.
“I have to start at 6 a.m. in order to be finished reading before midnight,” she said. “That’s just the scale of it.”
Organizers will set up a table with hand warmers and, hopefully hot coffee, she said.
“We will just read the names and we will stop when we get to the end.”
‘Their voice in our democracy will die if Jefferson Griffin wins.’
Normally, a mass reading of names is reserved for graduations or tragedies.
The comparison seemed fitting, Barr said.
“I’m not prone to hyperbole,” she said, “but if these votes, these valid votes are tossed, it is a tragedy for our democracy because we cannot rely on the fact that when we show up to vote anywhere in the country, in any election, that our vote will actually count.”
She continued: “Having our votes counted is foundational to having a democracy. So, to me, this is incredibly tragic. It’s one of the large cracks in the foundation of our democracy. It is robbing people of their right to vote. It’s robbing people of their rightful voices.”
She added: “Their voice in our democracy will die if Jefferson Griffin wins.”
Barr sent out requests for any voters affected to reach out to her.
She got more than a hundred responses, she said, including from active military members stationed overseas.
“Some of the most heartbreaking messages that I’ve gotten are actually from active duty military,” Barr said.
“These are people who have raised their hands and offered to sacrifice their lives for our country, and now we won’t count their votes if Jefferson Griffin wins his case. That’s horrifying.”
‘There is nothing wrong with these voters.’
A key takeaway from her conversations with voters. Barr said, was how similar they were, even if their demographics and politics differed wildly.
The voters registered to vote, were accepted, showed their IDs in order to vote, and have been doing it this way for, in many cases, decades.
“Every single one of these folks completed the voter registration form in the same way that you did, I did. And they have voted, many of them, for decades. They have taken themselves to vote, and they have voted, and their vote has counted, and there has been nothing to suggest that anything was wrong,” Barr said.
In a long conversation before the holiday, Riggs made the same point to Cardinal & Pine. Whatever legal twists and turns the lawsuit may follow, she said, the bottom line is the same.
These are legal voters, end of story.
“To our knowledge, there’s no cure process. There’s nothing you did wrong,” Riggs said she told voters who reached out to her team.
“There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing to fix,” Riggs said.
“There is nothing wrong with these voters.”
‘It’s almost certainly meritless.’
The case is circling around two courts at the moment, the state supreme court and a federal appeals court.
A federal judge agreed with Griffin that the matter should be settled in state and sent it back to the North Carolina Supreme Court, but Riggs appealed that decision, and a district court fast tracked the case and will hear arguments on Jan. 27.
It’s not yet settled which court will have the final word, but the State Supreme Court, whose chief justice is a mentor of Griffin’s, could have the votes to overturn the election.
One Republican on the court, however, seemed to reject the thrust of Griffin’s argument.
Justice Richard Dietz dissented from the court’s decision to hear the case, arguing that the thrust of Griffin’s argument “is almost certainly meritless.” But even in areas where Dietz may agree there is merit, he said, it’s too late to do anything in this election without striking at the heart of election integrity and voter confidence.
“Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules – and as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules – invites incredible mischief.”
Dietz said the court should not have taken up the case, based on a federal election doctrine called the Purcell principle that judges can’t intervene in election law once an election is near.
“The petition is, in effect, post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process,” Dietz wrote in his dissent.
“The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid,” Dietz said.
‘This is not just another step.’
In a virtual news conference about the lawsuit on Monday, Roy Cooper, now the former governor of North Carolina, said that Griffin’s lawsuit was no normal election protest.
“This is not just another step in the recount process,” Cooper said. “This is a scheme to throw out legal votes en masse by eligible voters who even showed their voter ID to be able to vote.”
He added: “Justice Allison Riggs won this election, period. Two separate recounts have confirmed this fact. Republicans know this. Judge Griffin … knows this.”
A reporter asked Cooper what all these voters had in common.
“They are all eligible voters who cast legal votes,” Cooper answered. “That’s what they have in common.”
On Tuesday at 6 a.m., their names, if not their voices, will be heard.
