Newby Court Strikes Again

Kirk Ross has started writing Carolina Mercury, where this first appeared, again for the next few months. You can subscribe here and we highly recommend that you do.

Justice Allison Riggs in her dissent in Kennedy v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, et al

Update: The State Board Of Elections sent out a release this afternoon saying it is working on new ballots and may need to seek a waiver on the 45 day requirement for military and overseas ballots.

Good morning, it wouldn’t be an election year in North Carolina without some late court ruling fucking things up.

WRAL — NC Supreme Court orders RFK Jr’s name to be taken off ballots, mail-in voting delayed by weeks

Opinion & Dissents

For the last decade, the state GOP has pushed for partisan judicial races. With control of the legislature, which controls elections, they succeeded and in the last cycle finally flipped the high court itself, winning two seats to make it a 4-3 GOP majority. If you want to know why so many people here are focused on downballot voting, there’s reason number one.

The Supreme Court has since gone on to earn that partisan label time and time again and last night in a brief, almost cursory ruling the court put absentee balloting in North Carolina on hold until the state’s 2,348 ballot styles can be reworked to remove Robert Kennedy Jr and the We The People Party from the presidential race. The roughly 3 million ballots already printed will likely be destroyed to avoid confusion and new ballots will have to be printed.

State law requires absentee ballots to be sent out 60 days prior to an election, which in this cycle was last Friday, September 6. That was put on hold when an as yet unidentified three member panel of the state Court of Appeals ruled in Kennedy’s favor. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling by, yeah, 4-3. Shocker.

The majority opinion, penned by Justice Trey Allen, centered around the potential disenfranchisement of voters who might think Kennedy is still on the ballot and vote for him.

Quick reminder that Kennedy is still on the ballot in most states, but in late August asked to be taken off the ballot in battleground states as part of a deal with Trump, who has since named him to his transition team.

Allen accused the state Board of Elections of deliberately ignoring Kennedy’s request even though the official request came after the state had started printing ballots to meet the 60-day requirement. He harrumphs:

“[W]e are unpersuaded by the practical objections defendants raise in their submissions to this Court. To a large extent, any harm suffered by defendants in light of the Court of Appeals’ order is of their own making.”

Allen’s defense of the bewildered Kennedy voter, was followed by a shorter, but somewhat sinister concurrence by Justice Phillip Berger Jr. sowing a few doubts about election integrity because of the board’s actions. Berger Jr. writes:

In a blistering and lengthy dissent, Justice Allison Riggs took the majority’s argument and the Court of Appeals ruling apart and pointed out that both failed thousands of absentee voters when they put the election on hold and effectively shortened the absentee voting period by weeks. She opened with:

Further on:

Riggs was joined by Justice Anita Earls, who also accused the majority of doing the opposite of what it claimed it was doing.

Both argued that giving Kennedy special treatment sets a precedent that could upset future elections.

There’s little doubt why Riggs, who led election protection teams as a civil rights lawyer, would focus on the impact of forcing a quick redo of the ballot and compressing the voting schedule on election workers in an already tense atmosphere.

In a lengthy post last night Wake County elections board member Gerry Cohen, who wrote a lot of election laws when he was on the staff at the General Assembly, set out difficult task ahead for local elections workers. Also of note: the counties have to pick up the tab for this.

It’s not hard to see where this is going, especially given the existing undercurrent of election conspiracies and the familiar, building drumbeat of complaints that the fix is in. This ruling, this incident, is neither isolated nor random and the court’s ruling fans the very flames of disenfranchisement that it claims to protect voters against.
Like an arsonist behind the wheel of a fire engine.