EDITORIAL: Will your vote count in NC?

Featured photo: An election worker dons an “I Voted” sticker on March 5, 2024 for Primary Election Day. (photo by Maaroupi Sani)

Recent developments in Georgia have me rattled.

Georgia, remember, is the state that President Joe Biden won in 2020 by 10,000 or so votes, the one where Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger — a Republican, mind you — refused Trump’s request to tinker with the election results and was widely vilified in insurrectionist circles for it.

Since then, the Republican-majority Georgia Legislature has created a slate of new laws, some of them just this month, that would have allowed them in 2020 to hand the state to Trump despite the vote tally.

The question in North Carolina becomes: Can they do this here? A new slate of election laws has passed in NC, and our own, Republican-majority legislature has never shied away from rigging elections in their favor.

In Georgia right now, state-level Republicans are fighting to scrub voter rolls, launching a website featuring a “glitch” that allows pretty much anyone, anywhere, to cancel someone’s voter registration in Georgia. 

As far as I can tell, no such voter purge has happened in NC — there are actually a couple hundred thousand more registered voters in the state as of this week than there were on Election Day in 2020.

But in Georgia, operatives stacked their Boards of Elections with loyalists in a scheme similar to the one posited by Project 2025. It gives county election boards the power to delay certification of election results using “reasonable inquiry,” giving every county board the power that Trump thought Mike Pence had on Jan. 6, 2020: to refuse to certify election results. NC Republicans have stacked the deck, too, but have not yet given local boards the power over results.

Georgia is increasing the number of partisan “poll-watchers” in the state and have increased their power to interfere; NC has done something similar. 

Georgia’s tweaks to its policy on absentee ballots seems mild — voters must show ID when they drop off absentee ballots in person, plus a couple other minor things — compared to NC, where we’ve decided that absentee ballots that don’t land by Election Day won’t be counted; in the past absentee ballots enjoyed a three-day grace period.

But we should remind you that, just as elections are won these days by very slim margins, they are also able to be manipulated by very slim margins. And as always, when it comes to the NC Legislature, when writing about the things they have not done to improperly influence election results, we must add the word “yet.”