Nothing should be shocking after Jan. 6, 2021, when an American president’s scheming to overturn the legitimate results of a fair election culminated in the bloody breaching of the Capitol. Still, I’m aghast at the audacity of what Republicans here in North Carolina are up to.
They are following in their leader’s footsteps and trying to steal an election. And if such an effort no longer seems as strange and sinister as it did before Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene and took a torch to whatever scruples still existed, that’s all the more reason to examine it closely. We need to be clear about where things stand. With an election denier about to move back into the White House and his disciples emboldened, our democracy is in danger. That’s the moral of the North Carolina story. It’s much, much bigger than this state.
The details: On Nov. 5, a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court was up for grabs, and the first official vote count showed that Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats among the court’s seven justices, had won re-election by a slim margin. Her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, demanded recounts. All in all, three separate counts gave Riggs a victory by slightly over 700 votes.
Which, in a properly functioning democracy with candidates and elected officials who put civic order and basic decency above their rapacity for power, would be the end of it. Hah. Griffin won’t concede. He continues to contest the result, which is being litigated simultaneously in state and federal courts. There won’t be any resolution for weeks.
The nature of his complaint is especially insidious. Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party, which supports him, aren’t producing evidence of voter fraud or a botched count. They’re disputing the legitimacy of more than 60,000 ballots, principally because the registration forms of many of the voters who cast them lack either a driver’s license or Social Security number, as law requires.
But that doesn’t mean the voters did anything wrong. Some of them may have registered before that information became mandatory in 2004. Long after that point, North Carolina routinely accepted registration forms without it. It’s also possible that voters provided it but that it’s not present in the state database because of administrative error or faulty record keeping.
The bottom line is that most or all of these voters had no reason to believe there was any issue with their status or their ballots, and they aren’t being accused of malfeasance. They’re just pawns in Republicans’ last-ditch bid to reverse Griffin’s defeat however possible.
“It’s inexcusable,” Heath Clay, a Republican city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., whose ballot is among those 60,000, said in a recent article in The Times by Eduardo Medina and Michael Wines. He in fact voted for Griffin but accepts that North Carolinians “have spoken” and that Griffin lost, and he considers Griffin’s attempt to invalidate his and others’ ballots “a direct attack on the voters.”
Clay’s appearance on the list of voters whose ballots are in dispute demonstrates that Griffin and his Republican allies can’t even be certain that a new count subtracting those votes would benefit them. But many of those votes were cast with mailed ballots, and mailed ballots generally favored Riggs.
Last week, the Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state election officials from certifying Riggs’s victory, thus keeping alive the possibility that Griffin could join their ranks and give them a 6-to-1 advantage over Democrats, versus the current 5-to-2. That increases the chances of Republican control of the court for many years.
Which matters not only in principle but also in practice: The court’s Republican majority has abetted Republican lawmakers’ aggressive gerrymandering of North Carolina, whose current U.S. House delegation, for example, contradicts the state’s political complexion. Although North Carolina has roughly equal numbers of registered Republicans and registered Democrats and just elected a Democratic governor, Josh Stein, by a nearly 15-point margin, it has only four Democrats among its 14 members of the House. It’s in some ways a paradigm of unrepresentative democracy.
And of Republican ruthlessness. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Andrew Dunn, a conservative who has worked as a Republican strategist and now produces a political newsletter in which he recently wrote: “I’ve spent years pushing back against the left’s tendency to go scorched earth in their rhetoric against N.C. Republicans. Everything is a ‘state of emergency,’ or ‘threat to democracy’ or ‘war’ on a beloved institution. Most of the time, it’s dishonest nonsense. Not this time.”
Dunn added that the North Carolina Supreme Court would destroy its credibility if it rewarded Griffin’s machinations.
Perhaps one of its own five Republican justices, Richard Dietz, agrees. In a dissent from his colleagues’ ruling that Griffin’s complaint should be heard, he wrote: “Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief.”
And incredible distrust of, and disgust with, the whole system. Except “incredible” isn’t the right adjective. I’m outraged without being the least bit surprised, and I’m almost sure of this: The fight over Riggs’s court seat is less anomaly than omen.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, Billy Witz described a resident of the Pacific Palisades taking in the spread of the fires: “He saw embers land on a home, then watched as the flames spread like fingers around a jewel box until it was engulfed.” (Thanks to Kate Kavanagh of Concord, Mass., for singling this out.)
Also in The Times, Amy Chozick questioned the priorities of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California: “He did make time to do a lengthy interview with ‘Pod Save America,’ in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he ‘wasn’t getting straight answers’ from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?” (That nomination comes from me.)
In Elle magazine, Gabrielle Korn looked beyond the fires: “Unless we confront the root causes of this destruction — climate change, capitalism and the political cowardice that enables both — we’re just planting flowers in a pile of ash.” (Also from me)
In Lookout Santa Cruz, Lily Belli delved into the limited supply and high prices of a grocery staple: “We don’t know if the chicken came before the egg, but the avian flu definitely came before the egg shortage.” (Dean Gottehrer, Santa Cruz, Calif.)
In The San Francisco Chronicle, G. Allen Johnson praised the latest movie in a British Claymation franchise, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” as “an impressive feat of clay.” (Barbara Heroux, San Francisco, Calif.)
To return to The Times, Sam Sifton counseled cooks through the making of French onion soup, with its climactic topping of French bread and Gruyère: “Broil until melty, then serve to applause, as if you’ve been running a brasserie in Montparnasse since the days of pay phones by the cloak room and ashtrays on the dinner table.” (Marcia Lewis, Cohasset, Mass.)
Also in The Times, Maureen Dowd noted the distance between Trump and other American presidents at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral: “Trump may be buoyed by his win, but in this exclusive club, he was largely narcissist non grata.” (Helen D. Mooty, Seabrook, Texas)
Bret Stephens scoffed at Trump’s stated desire to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America: “While he’s at it, what about changing the name of New Mexico to ‘Not Mexico’? Or Arizona to ‘Amerizona’? Or El Paso to ‘No Pasarán’?” (Pat Marriott, Wilmington, N.C.)
And Ezra Klein beheld the serial surrenders to Trump: “Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it.” (Helen C. Gagel, Evanston, Ill.)
In The Wall Street Journal, Holly Peterson examined the reaction among the privileged and pampered populace around Mar-a-Lago to living where the denizen of the White House seeks reprieve, with hordes of journalists, security guards and supplicants in tow: “Despite the hassles, most everyone here reports that they and their wallets are pleased to know that 45 will soon be 47. The headaches certainly haven’t kept others from migrating like geese and competing, daggers out, for rare plots of pricey real estate. Enterprising developers may soon ensure that skyscrapers outnumber palm trees in West Palm Beach. So the moneyed Misérables persevere — and party hard — beyond the barricades.” (Robin Hagey, Thousand Oaks, Calif.)
In The Guardian, Marina Hyde turned her gaze to Elon Musk: “We all live in the Muskoverse now. It’s a quirk of the age that the genius leading the race to the stars is also the idiot leading the race to the bottom.” (Brett Howser, Laguna Beach, Calif., and Terence Flynn, Chicago)
In The Washington Post, Ty Burr invoked a watery disaster that informed a Gordon Lightfoot hit to compliment Guy Pearce’s performance in the new movie “The Brutalist” as “a mid-20th-century Great Man with a smaller, meaner man inside him — a wreck of the F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Tom Cosgrove, Arlington, Va., and Dan Isaac, Rockville, Md., among others)
Also in The Post, Alexandra Petri fashioned a welcome to an impending addition to her family, about to arrive: “I watch your sister walk and talk and tell me about the world. There she is, planted in time, decades after me but still close enough that we will share the view from our windows for a long time. It is with her that I, myself, feel most like a window. Through me, everyone I’ve ever known and loved and lost is peeking out to greet her, in little fragments of song and familiar turns of phrase and the way I fiddle with my chin when I get nervous. I wish I could tell them about you.”
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On a Personal Note
For those of us who grew up or spent long chunks of our lives in snowy climes, it’s an absolute hoot to watch Southerners brace for a few flurries.
You’d think the apocalypse were at hand. People rush to the grocery store to stock up on provisions, as if roads might be impassable for a month. They preemptively excuse workers and students from showing up where workers and students would otherwise be expected to show up, the uncertain threat of snow having as much sinister force as the actual reality of snow. They stack firewood; they tug boots from the depths of closets; they pull flashlights from the backs of drawers — power lines could go down! It’s dramatic. Cinematic. And strangely charming.
It’s also, to be fair, not entirely overwrought. Down here in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, we don’t have the fleets of plows and troves of rock salt that, say, Minneapolis does, so even a little snow can hang around, harden and turn the roads into treacherous straits of ice. We got about an inch where I live, in Chapel Hill, on Friday evening, and when I took in my shimmering driveway and whitened cul-de-sac on Saturday morning, I was in no rush to drive and happy to hunker down. I had salmon filets and chicken thighs and pasta and (Dry January be damned) many bottles of wine — I always do. My own apocalypse would be amply fed and properly lubricated.
And so very pretty. That’s the best part of snow in the South. Because it’s an aberration, it’s a revelation. The sight of hedges and mailboxes under a coat of sparkling powder fill me with wonder, as if Mother Nature gifted us some fairy dust. Some new music, too: The crunch-clang-scrape of shovels clearing front stoops sounds almost as out of place in these parts as an elephant’s trumpeting would.
Before Friday, we hadn’t had snow for three years. A neighbor texted me that I should be sure to head outside and savor it, what with climate change and all. I bundled up, grabbed Regan’s leash and off we ventured into our winter wonderland. I wasn’t much of a venturer, though — I found myself timidly taking the tiniest and most delicate baby steps, as if navigating a minefield, as if the preservation of my endoskeleton depended on showing this brutal weather event the utmost respect.
That confirms it. I’m a Southerner now.
