Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
We went live last night to dig into the dizzying North Carolina Supreme Court election with the help of reporter Bryan Anderson, whose work has been fundamental to achieving small-d democratic justice for voters in a state sometimes prone to making that difficult.
The timing couldn’t have been better, as Anderson then broke the news that the case is finally racing toward a conclusion.
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Bryan Anderson was scrolling through the internet in the dark hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning when he came across something so perverse and disturbing that it made him nauseous: A longtime professor at UNC Greensboro… whose name was on a list of hundreds of people who had allegedly never lived in North Carolina and would thus have their votes disqualified from the ultra-tight state Supreme Court election that’s been stuck in litigation since November.
“He has voted in person on election day eight times,” Anderson said. “How on earth is that person a ‘never resident?’”
The discovery proved to be far more productive than the typical late Saturday night Google search. Spurred by the revelation, Anderson, a journalist who has covered the election in fine detail, dug further into the list of “never residents” whose votes had been challenged by Jefferson Griffin, the GOP nominee who trailed sitting Democratic Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. The margin had been confirmed by two recounts, but Republicans are pushing to have the result overturned due to various complaints surrounding photo ID and election administration.
Anderson drove to Greensboro, where he visited the addresses he’d found online for other voters who’d been disqualified for allegedly never living in North Carolina. The voters — or sometimes their family members — were shocked to learn about the erroneous disenfranchisement, then angered to hear that there was nothing they could do about it beyond hoping for a reversal by a judge or election officials.
Anderson, with help from researchers at Popular Information, wound up finding more than two dozen mislabeled voters, good for over 10% of the names on the “never resident” list.
Late Tuesday night, the North Carolina Board of Elections announced that votes by people improperly placed on that list would have to be counted, a huge development in a saga that has shaken many people’s faith in democracy. It also limited the number of challengeable votes to less than 1900, leading Anderson to project Riggs as the winner.
The timing is somewhat remarkable, coming just hours after Anderson joined Progress Report’s live stream to break down the ins and outs of the whole situation and explain how they got to this point.
Our discussion went deep into the electoral and reporting process, tracing a path from months before Election Day to a dispute over military and overseas voters that continues to rage for more than five months. It also helps us understand how this process works, both electorally and journalistically, and why it’s so important to support local and independent journalists. On that note, you can find Bryan’s coverage over at Anderson Alerts.
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