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Army helicopter pilot killed in DC plane crash was one of the NC voters Jefferson Griffin is trying to disenfranchise

By Michael McElroy

February 3, 2025

Griffin, who lost an election to join the NC supreme court, wants 60,000 votes to be thrown out so that he can win, including thousands of overseas military voters who followed election rules.

Capt. Rebecca Lobach, the Army pilot who was killed along with nearly 70 other people after a passenger plane collided with her Black Hawk Helicopter in Washington DC last week, is among the tens of thousands of North Carolina voters whose ballots Jefferson Griffin said should be thrown out from the 2024 election results so that he can win an election he lost. 

Griffin, a Republican appellate court judge, lost his race for a seat on the state Supreme Court to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast. He has challenged more than 60,000 ballots as invalid based on several criteria tied to existing election rules that were in place but that he says should not have been.

Some of the voters being challenged are overseas military voters who did not provide a copy of  a photo ID, which Griffin says they should have, even though state election officials determined several months before the election that they did not have to, a plan approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

Lobach is one of the some 5,500 voters in this group.

Much of the attention in the case has focused on the bulk of the 60,000 voters, whom Jefferson is challenging because their registrations seemed to be missing some information in a state database. But the outcry from voters and voting rights groups has been just as loud over this smaller subset of military voters and their families, raising questions of how Griffin, who is a Captain in the North Carolina National Guard, could seek to throw out the votes of fellow service members who are stationed overseas and followed the rules as they were presented to them.

“It’s staggering to me,” Bobby Jones, the president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership and a former Naval Commander, told Cardinal & Pine this month about Griffin’s targeting of military voters. 

“He knows better,” Jones said. “He lost. It’s evident that the man lost.”

Perhaps counterintuitively, active duty military voters might make an attractive target for voter suppression, Jones said, because, based on their training not to get involved in political sniping, they are less likely to complain publicly about having their votes questioned.

“I would love to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not because the United States military, we are trained to not have a voice politically. We fight to be apolitical. So if that was one of my absentee votes that was being debated right now, I’m not going to say anything,” Jones said. 

“[Griffin] he’s going to get minimal pushback from the actual people submitting the votes,” Jones said.

But Griffin has gotten pushback, if not directly from the overseas military voters, and the scrutiny has increased each day as the individual voters who will be affected share their stories.

‘They did everything right’

Carro Rose Edding, an Air Force veteran, retired public school teacher, and registered voter in Lee County, is also on Griffin’s list, she said at a news conference featuring affected voters last week. She enlisted in 1981 and her two brothers also served in the military, she said in her remarks.

Though she is in the group of voters being challenged over her registration, not an overseas ballot, she still finds it “unconscionable” that he would go after active duty military voters, she said. 

“I served in 12 locations throughout the world,” she said, and during each election in that timeframe, her mother made sure she and her brothers got their absentee ballots. 

“As a family, we have a combined 75 years of military service because we’ve always been committed to protecting our freedoms, including our right to vote.”

This was the first presidential election in which the Voter ID rule was in effect in North Carolina, but since election officials exempted overseas military voters from the rule in 2024, that means overseas military members followed all the absentee rules in this election just like she did when she was serving overseas, and just like Griffin himself did in two elections he was overseas for as well. 

“These men and women may not be living or serving in North Carolina, but they are North Carolinians nonetheless, and they did everything right to make their voices heard and deserve to have their votes counted,” Edding said.  “And Judge Griffin knows it.”

‘We should have our troops’ backs’

Other veterans on the list have also stepped into the void to speak for active duty members unable to speak for themselves. 

Mark David Maxwell, an Army veteran who is registered in Durham, but lives in Germany, wrote in the News & Observer that he was never told to provide a copy of his ID.

“My county election board never required nor requested me to provide a copy of any identification along with my absentee ballot. They asked me to sign an affidavit that I was an overseas voter and was who I claimed to be, and I did such.”

It is “outrageous,” he said, to think his vote may be thrown out.

“This is the method I have always voted since joining the Army and I was never — never — instructed to do anything differently.”

In a column for the Jacksonville Daily News, a newspaper that covers the area of Camp Lejeune, several former military leaders also pointed out that while overseas military voters did not have to show their ID to vote, they did have to confirm their identities to get their ballots in the first place.

“Military and overseas voters of North Carolina cast their ballots in 2024 with the correct understanding that they did not need to provide photo identification with their ballots,” former Army Secretary Louis Caldera, retired Gen. Carlton Fulford, retired Marine Admiral Charles Abbot, and former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James wrote.

“Instead, they had to provide information verifying their identities in order to receive a ballot.”

Lobach and other overseas voters followed the rules, the military leaders wrote, but even without trying to change the rules after the fact, the voting process for overseas military service members is already onerous. 

“Too many hurdles impede ballot access for military voters and their families. They must navigate a complex patchwork of state and local laws and the mundane realities of printing and shipping ballots to and from remote locations around the world. This reality discourages many of our service members from even attempting to vote,” the leaders wrote.

“Challenging voters by changing the rules after the fact is anathema to all that our troops defend with their lives: our country’s democratic form of government. North Carolina is home to nearly 100,000 active-duty service members, and many are deployed around the world.”

They continued: “We should have our troops’ backs the way they have ours.”

Author

  • Michael McElroy

    Michael McElroy is Cardinal & Pine's political correspondent. He is an adjunct instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and a former editor at The New York Times.

CATEGORIES: VOTING

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