The Democratic-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE ) voted on Friday to allow hundreds of potentially illegal votes to be counted in numerous elections, saying that doing so won’t affect election results.
Democratic party board members turned down a number of election protests, including one involving a provincial Supreme Court race and numerous legislative battles. Republican board member Stacy Eggers IV, who supported the motion to dismiss all demonstrations, said,” I really would see this action as a sweeping movement that’s an effort to just dispose of all these demonstrations without giving them the proper scientific interest that they deserve.” The movement was defeated by a 3-2 vote along party lines.
The charm of last week’s NCSBE decision, which threw out more protests from Democratic state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin, may have an impact on how the votes in question on Friday’s hearing are decided. However, they could very well have an impact on how the board decided to decide whether to hold the elections. The state Supreme Court, the figure whose composition will be impacted by the election, is the subject ofGriffin’s appeal.
The hearing on Friday addressed protests involving ballots that were supposedly cast by criminals, ballots that were cast by first voters who died before Election Day, and votes from voters who weren’t properly registered.
Despite acknowledging that some of the votes allowed for the matter were illegal, some Democrat members, including board chair Alan Hirsch, argued that the outcome is the only factor indetermining whether the count is accurate or not.
Kevin Lewis, Eggers ‘ only other Republican on the table, rebutted this concept, saying,” It may reduce the taint of problem. We must find it best and have the opportunity to do so.
County planks have declared some deceased voters ready, in contrast to the state board’s recommendation that a vote must be dead on Election Day to possess his vote counted.
In Wake County, North Carolina’s most populous state and household to Raleigh, the state election board decided to throw out the vote of 42 dying citizens, in conformity with the NCSBE, but decided to keep three after the emotional appeals of family people.
According to NCSBE attorney Paul Cox, there were three electors whose family showed up who were very upset about having their deceased relative’s vote challenged, and those three distinct citizens ‘ votes were never deemed inadmissible by the table.
After the meeting, Eggers again addressed these votes, saying,” It’s a very clear violation of equal protection and due process, to pull out three votes and allow them to count because someone shows up and gives a very emotional sob story while leaving 42 other votes that don’t count.” That is the very definition of arbitrary and capricious”.
Absentee voters who appear to reside permanently outside of North Carolina but who still ask for a state absentee ballot were one of the protests. Siobhan Millen, a Democrat board member, refrained from suggesting that people who live out-of-state and have taken full-time jobs in their new hometowns should not be able to vote in North Carolina. She claimed that the “kid may have… in the back of their mind” to return home to North Carolina at some point.
In response, Jonathan Marx, an attorney for one of the legislative candidates, said, “I’ll say my favorite jury instruction is that it’s impossible to directly scrutinize the inner workings of the human mind, and so we have to infer people’s intent from what they do. One extremely powerful and probative evidence of a person’s intent not to return to North Carolina is if they accept permanent, long-term employment elsewhere”.
Millen’s husband works for a law firm representing Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat incumbent whose election is in question with Griffin’s challenge. According to The Federalist, Millen was exonerated from the proceedings involving the protests in that election.
Eggers and Lewis, the NCSBE’s two Republican members who are actually concerned with election integrity, raised multiple concerns in the hearing. The Republicans decried county boards not giving the state board enough information to make sound judgments, in addition to rejecting the notion that vote errors don’t matter unless they affect election outcomes. Additionally, they criticized Democrat NCSBE members for flagrant disregard for the law as the state board interprets them as.
” When they ignore our clear and precise direction, to me, that sounds of corruption”, Lewis said.
Lewis cited the board’s authority to intervene, saying,” This board may take any action necessary to ensure that an election is determined without taint of fraud or corruption.” ” And part of that, to me, is that, you know, we make sure that the vote is accurate, and there’s been protests made]with ] I think, verified inaccuracies, and I think it was just incumbent on us to take action to see that those get corrected”.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered issues of education and culture for Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner. He is a Publius Fellow at the 2022 Claremont Institute and holds a degree from the University of Virginia. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
