Summary

The North Carolina Supreme Court, in a 5-1 Republican-led decision, blocked certification of Democratic Justice Allison Riggs as the winner of a state Supreme Court race.

Riggs leads Republican Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes after recounts, but Griffin claims 60,000 ballots were illegally cast and seeks to have them invalidated.

The court will now hear Griffin’s challenge, with briefs due by January 24.

Democrats criticized the move as partisan, while the lone Democratic justice dissented, arguing there is no basis to delay certification or disrupt the election process.

  • @[email protected]
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    521 day ago

    Lol.

    We’re literally going to let anti-democratic shitstains abuse the fuck out of our institutions, wearing them down, until they can simply assume and not give up power because our institutions are too stretched thin and weakened to do anything about it.

    Holy fuck our founding fathers would be utterly ashamed.

    If you’re a history buff interested in the fall of Rome, this time period in America must be utterly terrifying and fascinating to witness.

    • @[email protected]
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      614 hours ago

      Also 1933 Germany. Although Hitler only got about 35 percent of the popular vote, so facism in the US right now is actually more popular than it was in Germany when the Nazis took over.

  • @[email protected]
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    411 day ago

    This is how it’s going to go down in every Republican-led government from now on. They learned that nobody will do shit to stop them.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 day ago

      That would have been on voters to stop them for being undemocratic. But nope. Just voting along party lines all the way to hell.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 day ago

    The only reason this is even a case is because of the National elections and Trump’s actions that he was held unaccountable for apparently.

    The changes in North Carolina were among the most extensive state voting reforms passed last year and continue a trend among Republican state legislatures, many of which have passed laws since 2021 adding new voting restrictions. The laws were pushed through after former President Donald Trump began falsely claiming that widespread fraud cost him reelection, claims that have resonated with many Republicans.

    Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have criticized many of the new laws as attacks on voting rights that often target minority and low-income voters. North Carolina’s changes in 2023 were pushed through without any Democratic support by Republican lawmakers who hold a super-majority in the legislature. They overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, whose final term ends this year. (link)


    If Trump had been held liable for election interference /fraud / misinformation, you wouldn’t have people down ballot having the courage to be so shady. If the Democrats actually tried relinquishing some of their control over elections, we might have a system that was fair and honored the citizens participating (they do very little in the way of FPTP problems like informing their base and usually step in to stop changes)

  • @[email protected]
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    392 days ago

    But hey, Democrats relinquished power without resistance on January 6th and had a snowball fight, so they are The Real Winners!

    It got this bad when things were better, and the democrats of today still seem to be the democrats of two decades ago.

    • Skeezix
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      71 day ago

      If the republican had won, it would be all good: no interference just the will of the people.

    • ThePowerOfGeek
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      382 days ago

      Trump: “oh shit, they’re on to me!.. I’M GOING TO INVADE THE ANTARCTIC AND SOUTH GEORGIA ISLAND TOO!!!”

    • @[email protected]
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      21 day ago

      No, he is serious about that. It’s on his Putin to do list to destroy US alliances in the Baltics.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 days ago

      The Supreme Court will be compromised for life, legislative is next but is already essentially gamed on a state by state level and a “nation undivided” indoctrination, and the executive just needs to play its part to cement the rich asshole oligarchy state. The only way to fix it is a skewed “democracy” every few years where certain votes count more than others and the population is stupid and saturated by propaganda.

    • FenrirIII
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      11 day ago

      But half the people want this. They don’t care about rules and decorum. All they care about is their side winning.

      • NoneOfUrBusiness
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        302 days ago

        I mean it ended with France becoming a democracy so… Yeah. A lot of nonsense happened, but modern France exists as a result of the French revolution.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 day ago

          You’re skipping over the time immediately following the French Revolution… You know, when it became a dictatorship?

          • NoneOfUrBusiness
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            118 hours ago

            I included that in the “nonsense” part. A lot of bad followed the French revolution, but a lot of good did too and the result was a much more free France even during the Bourbon Restoration.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 day ago

              Oh you just care about French peasants? God forbid you check out any other country and what they did instead. It must be fucking violence and war with you people.

              • @[email protected]
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                81 day ago

                I’m fairly confident France was by far one of the nicer more progressive places to live, I don’t think your argument improves if you talk about a russian serf. Britain might be a good example, but Britain absolutely liberalized because they were afraid of the same violence - the threat becomes a lot more real when your neighboring royalty lost their heads.

                • @[email protected]
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                  1 day ago

                  Sure, except from what I’ve read most liberalization we care about didn’t happen until the 20th century, at least 50 years after the 1848 uprisings, and at least 100 years after the French Revolution. That speaks to a certain lack of urgency. But no, there were commoners all over Europe, and the world. The French were not special. We even have modern examples of getting out from under dictatorships and oligarchies. They mostly involve having so many people in the street that it’s impossible to stop them. I can count the number of modern armed rebellions that worked on one hand, and they’re a puppet of Turkey now.

                  The only thing a French style revolution is going to bring us is battles with no prisoners, political inquisitors committing mass murder, and foreign troops trying to maintain a semblance of order near Mexico and Canada to contain the violence and possibly secure our nuclear warheads. Then people are going to be tired of all that and they’ll run to the nearest strongman. In the best case scenario those guys will make an alliance and actually end the fighting. In the worst case scenario we balkanize like Afghanistan and then everyone supports a theocracy because at least most of us are Christian and it’s unifying. Except it’s the worst most fundamentalist version because it’s led by a strongman type too.

                  They say politics and economics are unique sciences because you can’t run experiments properly. But we can absolutely dissect history and figure out what to avoid.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 days ago

              Oh good, thank you for your sacrifice.

              Wait? You want me to live in a civil war hellhole too? Fuck no, fuck you. There are peaceful ways to do this.

                • @[email protected]
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                  42 days ago

                  After 80 years of switching back and forth between Republics and Monarchies. With mob violence, civil wars, and brutal crackdowns. Which mostly killed commoners, not nobles. It wasn’t until 1870 that they stabilized as a Republic, because they lost a war to the Germans.

                  We could do that or we could follow the example of the many countries who defended their rights or claimed them by filling the streets with people.

                  I’m not the one with a reading comprehension problem.

    • @[email protected]
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      272 days ago

      Nah this won’t happen. Because there will likely not be an election. Or there will be an “election” with Trump winning 100% of the vote.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 day ago

        They wouldn’t make it that blatant. A sham election is a lot more convincing when they do something like rigging it to ensure Trump wins by razor-thin margins in every swing state.

      • Bakkoda
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        71 day ago

        120% of the vote. Can’t set a record for the bestest biggestest vote with a measly 100%

    • @[email protected]
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      92 days ago

      His head narrows toward the top, with his eyes appearing too small and too close together, and the top of his head seeming too small proportionally. Very cartoonish.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 days ago

            Yeeting the rich sounds fun. Just have to be careful where you do it, like the punkin chukin competitions. You know, to prevent any damage to anything important.

            Make it a sport, whomever (or maybe top 5) yeets their rich person the furthest wins 10% of their net worth, the rest is used for social programs.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 days ago

              What and then we load that guy straight into the trebuchet because he would then probably be a billionaire?

              • @[email protected]
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                11 day ago

                Nah, they could be exempt the same way lottery winners could be, since they didn’t do anything shady or anti-social to get it. It’s also unlikely they would have the money long (similarly to lottery winners).

                Unless they turned into assholes and got put on the list. Then yeet the new rich! :)

    • @RamblingPanda
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      52 days ago

      What if they block that with a supreme supreme court supreme?

  • @[email protected]
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    2 days ago

    So … do Americans record who voted what in their elections? Its all well and good to say 60,000 votes were invalid … but how does he know what they voted? It could be pretty easy to argue that poorly recorded voter details would all be for right wing ‘small government’ nut jobs that would have voted Republican. Immigrants also tend to be conservative.

    Given he’s unlikely to be happy that the 60,000 come off his quota, or even with a 50/50 split to cover the fact that no-one knows where they could have come from, does the state have to revote?

    I feel like a good campaign ad for Riggs would include “Griffin is a sore loser and is now wasting $X Million and your valuable time going back to revote, he clearly thinks you and your tax dollars are worthless.”

    • @[email protected]
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      31 day ago

      Who voted is recorded, but ballots are anonymous and secret, so once they hit the box it’s functionally impossible to match them up again, which makes removing and recounting impossible. I assume the goal is a special election due to the number of invalid votes being likely to have affected the election.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 day ago

      Idk about this specific case, but it’s probably targeted on demographics. Mail-in votes tend to swing Democrat. People without ID tend to be poor minorities who swing Democrat. Urban areas swing Democrat. The parties put tons of research into profiling demographics, so they can supress votes and do stuff like this.

    • @[email protected]
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      82 days ago

      They don’t have the identity, if I remember right these are mail in ballots with a post date missing or some such. They have the physical ballots they can count, or not.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 days ago

        Nah the article says the voter registrations are missing details like drivers licence and social security numbers. But yeah, the 60k votes could be for anyone. You can only assume he sees a revote as a chance to take another spin at the wheel and maybe this time it will land on red.