If you want to see how a second Trump administration may erode America’s democracy, either wait another month or look at how Republicans have been behaving not just in their deep-red strongholds but competitive states like North Carolina, where the state GOP is openly seeking to overturn the will of the people.
Take the governor’s office. Democrat Josh Stein, running to succeed term-limited Gov. Roy Cooper, won last month in a landslide, defeating a Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, an avowed “Black Nazi” whose porn habits were exposed in the weeks before the November election. Typically, when voters choose to elect a person to public office, they do so with the expectation that the person will carry out the duties of that office.
But this week, North Carolina Republicans — representing the party that lost the gubernatorial race — voted to strip power from the incoming Democratic governor. Under the guise of hurricane relief, the state’s GOP-led legislature voted to eliminate Gov.-elect Stein’s ability to appoint members of the state election board, where Democrats presently hold a 3-2 majority, shifting the authority to the state auditor, a Republican. To further limit the possibility of Democrats gaining and exercising power, GOP legislators also voted to slash the time voters are permitted to request absentee ballots and cure any problems with ballots they’ve cast.
Lt. Gov. Robinson, presiding over a Senate session earlier this month, called the police on protesters who had entered the gallery to express opposition to the power grab, according to Carolina Public Press, a nonprofit news organization. Had Robinson won, he would be inheriting the power to make appointments to the state utilities commission, which sets electricity rates, and pick the head of the state’s highway patrol — all powers that have now been stripped from November’s victor.
Republicans also voted to block the state’s Democratic attorney general from arguing any legal positions that are opposed by the GOP legislature, per Axios, and curbed the power of the state superintendent, another Democrat, to exercise oversight over charter schools. And they did all this in a lame-duck session after losing their veto-proof majority in the state house.
“What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve,” Anderson Clayton, head of the North Carolina Democratic Party, told Mother Jones this week.
Clayton was not even referring, specifically, to the power grab in the state legislature, but a parallel attempt to subvert the will of voters. Also in November, Allison Riggs, a Democrat and associate justice on the state Supreme Court, narrowly defeated her Republican opponent, Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin. After two recounts, Riggs was determined to have won by just over 700 votes.
No matter: Griffin and the state GOP are trying to throw out 60,000 other ballots, relying in part on a legal argument already rejected by courts prior to the election — that votes cast from people overseas, including members of the military, should be tossed if they were not accompanied by a photocopy of their photo identification; the party also maintains that ballots should be tossed from voters if there is no copy of such identification in their registration file, its challenge disproportionately targeting younger voters and people of color.
“Prior to 2020, you never saw these types of claims,” Democratic election attorney Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, commented this week. “Donald Trump popularized it.”
So far, at least, the claims have been just as successful — which is to say, unsuccessful. On Wednesday, the state Board of Elections, still led by Democrats, rejected the GOP arguments on Wednesday, moving Riggs one step closer to having her victory certified. But, as NBC News reported, their decision could be appealed and the case ultimately decided by the GOP-led state Supreme Court.
Riggs, for her part, is framing the challenge to her victory as part of a broad assault on the right to vote.
“I want to make sure that everyone understands what’s happening — that the ability of military voters and their families is under attack in this post-election dispute,” she said of the efforts to overturn her victory. “It should be troubling to everyone.”
