Guest Editorial
The right to vote is the rock upon which all others are built. It fosters accountability, allows for progress, and ensures our voices are heard. People have fought and died for that right. Two years ago, a candidate running for the highest court in North Carolina lost his election. But, against everything I know he learned in law school, he decided that the law was simply less important than his ego.
Judge Jefferson Griffin did everything in his power to attack our rights and change the results of that Supreme Court election. Over the course of six months, he challenged the legitimacy of more than 65,000 ballots, including roughly 5,500 cast by military service members and other overseas voters. Griffin would rather have thrown out the votes of Americans defending our rights than admit that he had lost.
Even more shocking, several members of our state’s Supreme Court thought his attempts to steal a seat on that body were all on the up and up. Only one Republican justice voted his conscience and sided with the pro-democracy members of the Court. Justice Richard Dietz, that one Republican, warned that Griffin’s case would “fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”
I am not sure if this offends me more as a law school student or as a veteran. It was both morally and intellectually corrupt. Griffin never claimed fraud, and two recounts confirmed his loss. He simply wanted to throw out ballots cast under the rules in place on Election Day, many from voters who had participated in our elections for decades without a problem. Trying to change the rules of the election after the votes had already been cast? Shameful.
Now, this ordeal eventually ended with the candidate who won the most votes, Justice Allison Riggs, sitting on the North Carolina Supreme Court today. But the tools used two years ago are all still on the table, and it would be naïve to think that the anti-democracy forces in our state will not try to use them again if any of this year’s races are close. The anti-democracy majority is still sitting on the North Carolina Supreme Court. This November, Justice Anita Earls, one of only two Democrats on that seven-member Court and one of the justices who stood against Griffin, is on the ballot. If she loses, that majority grows to 6-1. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 2, one of the last pillars of the Voting Rights Act. Our legislature decided that we all needed a fifth congressional map in six years to further take away voting power from the people. We all need to do our part in preventing any more backsliding and getting our state and our country back on the side of progress.
Jefferson Griffin came close to stealing an election in our state two years ago. He thought that losing by just 734 votes gave him room to ignore what both his legal education and what his honor ought to have told him was right. Anti-democracy candidates will try the same thing again. The best thing we can do to stop them is vote, vote, vote.
When we make our voices heard and win with margins too large to cheat, they have to accept the results. We have our pro-democracy candidates, we have the numbers to put them in or keep them in office, and I think we are going to do just that.
Early voting runs through October 31, and Election Day is November 3. Make a plan to vote and do your part.
Tysen Moy, a Law Student and U.S. Army Veteran
