NC election officials limit the voters at risk in Jefferson Griffin case. But courts could intervene again.

The North Carolina Board of Elections said it would only seek to cure up to 1,675 ballots in a court-ordered review, a move that if it holds, could make it difficult for Griffin to overturn his election loss to Allison Riggs. Republicans on the state courts, however, could push for more. 

The Neverending Story, the beloved 80s children’s movie, was in part about a gargantuan, swirling “Nothing” that ate heroes and monsters alike. 

This Nothing – a storm of growing emptiness that started as despair – threatened to devour entire worlds that had been built and sustained by centuries of ideals, hope, and imagination.

In other words, it served as a preview of Jefferson Griffin’s efforts to throw out tens of thousands of valid votes so that he could win an election he lost.

The Griffin case threatened to annihilate a century of legal precedents and elementary rules of fairness, and could establish a playbook, voting advocates say, for future losing candidates to ignore election results and destroy the concept of democracy itself. And, like the movie, the case has over the last five months of back and forth legal filings, protests, and court rulings, felt truly never ending. 

In recent days, however, developments have moved us closer to a potential conclusion, even if it is too soon to tell what that ending will be.

The North Carolina Board of Elections on Tuesday night released its plan to adhere to a court-ordered review of the contested ballots that have survived Griffin’s muli-part challenges. 

The plan, released in court filings, takes the most limited option available to the board, focusing only on the remaining ballots included in Griffin’s initial challenge, which total up to 1,675 votes, most of which are from overseas voters, primarily service members stationed abroad and their families.

Griffin challenged thousands more overseas ballots in subsequent filings as the case dragged on, but they came after a state-mandated deadline, the state board said in its plan, and so would not be reviewed or face the risk of being tossed out. So the number of voters at risk of being challenged ranged from 1,675 to more than 5,500. The court rulings were not clear on which of Griffin’s challenges they should apply to. The BOE chose the limited view, focusing on the smaller number of ballots challenged before the state deadline.

If the BOE’s limited plan survives further court interventions, Griffin likely will not have the wiggle room to overturn his 734-vote loss to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs.

But there are still plenty of ways Griffin or the courts could derail the board’s plan and force officials to include thousands of additional ballots to scrutiny. And since Griffin only challenged overseas military voters in Democratic-leaning counties, ignoring the voters who voted that way in Republican counties, the larger the bucket of votes officially in play, the greater the chances that Griffin could cherry-pick his way onto the state’s highest court.  

@cardinalandpine

Republicans on the state appeals court and NC Supreme Court have ordered a process that could help their colleague Jefferson Griffin gain a seat on the state’s highest court that he failed to win in the November election. If he does steal the seat, it will be because the votes of overseas military members and their families were thrown out of the final tally. NC Sen. Val Applewhite, an Air Force veteran who served overseas, spoke at a rally on Monday, vowing to be the “battle buddy” of these military members and promising to do everything she could to protect their votes.

♬ original sound – Cardinal & Pine

A quick recap

In the days after the election in November, two recounts confirmed Riggs’ 734-vote margin of victory.

Soon after, Griffin filed challenges to more than 65,000 ballots.

Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected Griffin’s efforts to toss 60,000 of those votes because of so-called incomplete voter registrations. But the court bolstered his attempt to throw out several thousand overseas ballots that were submitted without voters providing a copy of an ID. These voters did not provide their IDs because they were told by election officials they did not need to and there was no way for them to do so in the state’s online absentee ballot portal. 

RELATED: ‘We shouldn’t be here’ : Effort to throw out votes in NC Supreme Court race threatens election integrity, Riggs says 

The court, which includes three judges who have close ties to Griffin, said these ballots should not have been counted, and instructed state election officials to give the voters 30 days to provide a copy of their voter ID to “cure” their ballots. 

If they did not, or missed the deadline, their ballots should be removed from the total, the court said.

With the BOE’s plan, if it holds, this will apply only to the 1,675 ballots and not the nearly 4,000 others.

‘It just makes me feel like my vote doesn’t really matter.’

McLaurin Hull, a junior at Davidson College, studied abroad in Madrid, Spain last fall, and before she left the state, her family insisted she draw up her voting plan well in advance.

Voting was sacred in her family, Hull, whose legal first name is Margaret, said. 

“ My family is pretty adamant about being very prepared for voting, especially my grandma,” Hull said.

“She is very particular and makes sure that we know everything that we need to know.”

Hull, with her grandmother’s help, researched the steps she would need to submit her ballot while overseas.

Each time she checked the detailed steps on the state board’s website, the guidance was the same. Fill out the ballot carefully and honestly, under penalty of perjury, and submit it under the specific guidelines. 

Overseas voters did not have to provide a Voter ID. She checked. She double checked. The absentee form itself also said she did not need a voter ID.

Then she voted. 

RELATED: Four of the Republican judges in the Jefferson Griffin case were his de facto running mates in a previous election 

Hull, who is registered in Guilford County, is on the list of voters Griffin wants to disenfranchise and, if the “curing process” survives Riggs’ appeals to federal courts, she’ll have to provide her photo ID in order to have her vote counted. 

“ I felt pretty frustrated. We were very careful about making sure I was doing everything correctly,” she said. 

“ If they had required me to submit my photo ID, I would’ve done it.”

This was the first election since she turned 18, she said, and this was her first time voting. It’s hard, she said, not to take it personally.

“It just makes me feel like my vote doesn’t really matter If they can just kind of change the rules about who can vote and how one can vote after everybody votes.”

Now that she is back in North Carolina, she will take all the steps to prove her identity once her county board issues formal guidance, she said, but wonders how much harder it would be if she was still abroad.

“I’ll absolutely do what I can to ensure that my vote will be counted, however, I imagine that it might be much more difficult for people who are still overseas.”

‘A terrifying prospect that we all have to stand up and stand against.’

Whether the ultimate curing process involves the smaller number of voters or the larger, the bulk of them will still be from overseas military voters, a demographic that already faces significant burdens to voting. 

 ”One of the things about being on active duty is that you don’t ever really control where you are at any given moment,” Alex Rich, an Air Force veteran who served in Afghanistan, told Cardinal & Pine after the Riggs rally on Monday.

“Particularly for folks … who are deployed a lot, you don’t have any kind of predictability over where you’re gonna be.” 

That makes it harder to cast their ballots in time, Rich said. 

“You have to go through an extra effort to be able to get a mail-in ballot and to be able to stay up on the issues and to be able to cast that ballot in accordance with the instructions on the ballot, just like thousands of these [voters] did,” he said.

That also means it will be far more difficult to contact these voters to let them know that they need to take extra steps to have their votes, cast months ago, actually count. Then those individuals will have to find the time to actually take those steps.

“The notion that to go through all that extra effort, not just to serve your country in uniform, but also to do your duty as a citizen and then after the fact have your vote questioned, is just outrageous,” Rich said

He added: “To do this to military folks …  is a terrifying prospect that we all have to stand up and stand against.”

Another veteran, Scott Peoples of the veteran advocacy group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, said that Griffin has violated not just his judicial oath, but his oath of service.

Griffin is a member of the North Carolina National Guard and has voted by absentee ballot in previous elections while deployed.

“Throughout our history soldiers have fought and died for the constitutional right to vote,” Peoples, a former captain in the Army’s 82 Airborne division said in a statement on Friday after the NC Supreme Court issued its ruling. “Jefferson Griffin does not deserve to wear the sacred uniform.” 

Griffin’s “continued assault on our electoral system is a disgrace to the honor of anyone that has ever served,” he added.

Riggs vows to ‘fight for every vote.’

The resolution in the Griffin case is not here yet, but it is perhaps as close as it’s ever been. 

At a rally in Raleigh on Monday, Riggs vowed to fight for every vote, and, if it came to it, to make sure every affected voter knows what they need to do in those 30 days.

Riggs, a former voting rights lawyer, said she was made for this fight.

“I refuse to be bullied, and refuse to be intimidated,” she said. 

However the case ends, there will always be questions of why and how it came this far.

In “the Neverending Story”, the Nothing – being a nothing – never gave a motive for wanting to destroy everything. 

The closest the audience, and those fighting against it, ever got to an explanation was from one of the minions doing the Nothing’s bidding, a wolflike beast named G’mork with a great actor’s voice.

The Nothing, G’mork said, was “like despair, destroying this world.”

So why help the effort, the hero, Atreyu, asks.

“Because,” the beast said, “people who have no hopes are easy to control. And whoever has the control, has the power.”

Soon Atreyu picked up a broken and sharp shard of wreckage, and told the beast that if it was going to attack, then get on with it already.

The beast, seemingly startled by the display of courage, seemed hesitant. 

Then it charged.

Spoiler alert: That didn’t work out great for G’mork.