EDITORIAL: Rigging elections and government waste

The latest attack on free and fair elections in North Carolina came this week from the Republican National Committee, with a little help from the state GOP.

It’s a lawsuit that alleges something provably false: that undocumented residents are voting in NC elections in large numbers.

This is in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the same people last week, claiming the very same thing. That one, in which the GOP claimed that potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign-born non-citizens in NC — there are perhaps 500,000 of them in the state — may have registered to vote in the November election, was dismissed by a Superior Court judge after the state Board of Elections called it “an entirely false premise.”

Unabashed, state and national Republicans sued again. This week’s lawsuit asks a federal judge to remove 225,000 North Carolinians from the voter rolls, claiming they were allowed to register to vote without proving their identities.

The suit references a state law that went into effect about seven weeks ago, making it seem more than a little premature. And like so many Republican efforts to sow disinformation and mistrust among us, this suit provides a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

For one, it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in NC — it’s in the state Constitution as of 2024 at the behest of GOP leadership, who put it on the ballot. It was illegal before that, too.

For another, it is a felony for a non-citizen to even register to vote, let alone cast an actual vote in NC. Ask yourself how many immigrants would be willing to jeopardize their entire lives here just to cast a single vote. 

We actually have an answer to that question. When the state BOE compared a list of registered voters against a list of people who asked to be removed from jury duty because they were non-citizens, they found nine people in total.

The GOP knows that non-citizens do not vote in NC. They know that elections are stolen not by individuals casting single votes, but by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Or, like the last election-rigging scandal in the state, you can collect large numbers of blank absentee ballots and then file them for your candidate. That fraud was perpetrated by a Republican, by the way.

In knowing these things, the party is guilty of using the state judicial system in bad faith, perpetuating a massive waste of taxpayer money chasing ghosts and seeking to disenfranchise perhaps a quarter-million North Carolinians of their right to vote.

With anti-American activities like this, it’s no wonder they believe they can’t win elections without cheating.