Lyon      At the Voter Purge Project, we keep hoping secretaries of state around the United States have sort of learned their lesson.  We don’t really believe that, but given how difficult it is to convince people that constant monitoring and tedious database care is essential to protect voter lists, we’re always hoping the problem is now more with us.  Maybe we’re not a voice crying in the wilderness about a serious threat to what’s left of democracy, but somehow, we’re just out of step and not in tune to how much progress has been made in the last few cycles, since we began this work in earnest more than five years ago and several election cycles gone by.  But then we have the latest outrage, this time in North Carolina, that could set us back years and disenfranchise millions if allowed to stand.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that North Carolina has been a highly partisan war zone where a Democratic governor has been fighting for years with a hard right Republican legislature with the balance tipping back and forth from one issue to another.  Like in Wisconsin, elections for the judicial seats on the state supreme court have been heavily contested.  Unlike Wisconsin, the issue this time is not over which party and persuasion would be the swing vote.  No, on the seven-person court, there are only two seats held by Democrats and one of them narrowly won re-election over a lower court Republican judge trying to move up to that seat.

North Carolina’s legislature has jumped on the red wagon and added a number of barriers to voting and registration.  The losing judge took a shot and went to court to overturn the election arguing that a bunch of voters, 65,000 in fact, did not properly prove their eligibility over some technicalities, largely not providing either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number.  Court papers indicate that many of these voters in fact DID provide these numbers when they voted, but they didn’t show up on the state’s voter database for some reason, perhaps a typing error or not updating a marriage or whatever.  The loser argued that all of them should be disenfranchised, even though they had voted and the local election officials had allowed their vote, unless they could “cure” their ballot in some limited period of time.  A three-judge appeals court voted 2 to 1 to give voters 15 days to fix the problem.  Face it, in 15 business days, 65,000 people could not all successfully show up promptly to collect a thousand dollars on a free giveaway.

The dissenting judge was clear that there was no way that changing the rules AFTER AN ELECTION was anything other than unconstitutional.  It’s hard to see the appeals panel as fair and objection.  They even jumped into another lane and disqualified a group of so-called “never residents” from voting, despite a rare bipartisan act passed earlier that in fact did give them the right to vote.

The Times’ report is clear that the stakes are huge here not just in North Carolina, but for the rising tide of loser efforts to overturn their loses and disqualify voters following the Trump example in 2020.

…courts have almost universally held that legally cast votes cannot be invalidated under protections provided by the Constitution. “By changing the rules of the game after it’s been played to potentially disenfranchise as many as 60,000 voters, this court has gone where no court has gone before,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who was national counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 election and recount. “Until this decision, courts facing challenges to ballots cast in compliance with past practice and election administrators’ instructions had uniformly sided with the voters.” “If the State Supreme Court affirms the lower court’s decision, that would present a federal constitutional question for consideration by the Supreme Court of the United States,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

North Carolina is a long way from the worst state keeping its records.  The state allows access to the list without cost and without hassle via its website.  Unlike many others, monitoring the list is straightforward, but errors do happen.  Door knocking voters who had been purged before the 2020 election in and around Charolotte, we found an error rate higher than one-third on visits completed, so there are problems and work that needs to be done.

Obviously, this is a long way from being over, but it underscores how monitoring the accuracy of voter list is critical before elections in order to fix these problems before they threaten the democratic process, not after impunity and partisanship has prevailed to further erode voting rights.