The Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) voted Friday to allow hundreds of potentially illegal votes to be counted in multiple elections, claiming that allowing them does not affect election outcomes.
Democrat board members rejected several elections protests, including one from a statewide race for Supreme Court and multiple legislative battles. “I just would see this motion as a sweeping motion that’s an attempt to just dispose of all these protests without giving them the proper factual attention that they deserve,” Republican board member Stacy Eggers IV said of the motion to dismiss all protests, which passed 3-2 along party lines.
While the votes in question in Friday’s hearing might not change election outcomes, they could very well come into play depending on the appeal of last week’s NCSBE decision, when the board threw out more protests from Republican state Supreme Court candidate Judge Jefferson Griffin. Griffin has appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court — the very body whose makeup will be affected by the election.
Friday’s hearing addressed protests to ballots allegedly cast by felons, ballots cast by early voters who then died before Election Day, and ballots from voters not properly registered.
Some Democrat members, including board chair Alan Hirsch, acknowledged that some of the votes permitted for the count were improper but maintained that the outcome is the only issue that matters, regardless of whether the count is exactly correct.
Kevin Lewis, Eggers’ only fellow Republican on the board, rebutted this idea, saying, “It might remove the taint of corruption. … We need to get it right and have the opportunity to get it right.”
On the issue of deceased voters, county boards have declared some dead voters eligible, against the directive from the state board that a voter needs to be alive on Election Day to have his vote counted.
In Wake County, North Carolina’s most populous county and home to Raleigh, the county election board decided to throw out the votes of 42 deceased voters, in compliance with the NCSBE, but decided to keep three after the emotional pleas of family members.
“There were three voters whose relatives showed up, who were very emotional about having their deceased relative vote ballot challenged, and those three particular voters’ ballots were not deemed to be ineligible by the board,” NCSBE counsel Paul Cox explained.
Later in the meeting, Eggers addressed these votes again, saying, “It’s a very clear violation of equal protection and due process, to pull out three votes and allow them to count because someone shows up and gives a very emotional sob story while leaving 42 other votes that don’t count. That is the very definition of arbitrary and capricious.”
Some of the protests dealt with absentee voters who appear to live full-time outside North Carolina but still request an absentee ballot for the state. Democrat board member Siobhan Millen balked at the suggestion that people who live out-of-state and have taken full-time jobs in their new location should not be able to vote in North Carolina, saying the “kid may have … in the back of their mind” to return home to North Carolina at some point.
In response, Jonathan Marx, an attorney for one of the legislative candidates, said, “I’ll say my favorite jury instruction is that it’s impossible to directly scrutinize the inner workings of the human mind, and so we have to infer people’s intent from what they do. One extremely powerful and probative evidence of a person’s intent not to return to North Carolina is if they accept permanent, long-term employment elsewhere.”
Millen’s husband works for a law firm representing Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat incumbent whose election is in question with Griffin’s challenge. As The Federalist reported, Millen was let off the hook on a motion to recuse herself from proceedings regarding the protests in that election.
Eggers and Lewis, the NCSBE’s two Republican members who are actually concerned with election integrity, raised multiple concerns in the hearing. In addition to rejecting the idea that vote errors don’t matter unless they affect election outcomes, the Republicans decried county boards not giving the state board enough information to make good judgments. They also rebuked Democrat NCSBE members for green-lighting counties’ flagrant noncompliance with the law, as interpreted by the state board.
“When they ignore our clear and precise direction, to me, that sounds of corruption,” Lewis said.
“This board may take any action necessary to assure that an election is determined without taint of fraud or corruption,” Lewis said of the board’s authority to intervene. “And part of that, to me, is that, you know, we make sure that the vote is accurate, and there’s been protests made [with] I think, verified inaccuracies, and I think it was just incumbent on us to take action to see that those get corrected.”
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