Election F*ckery, Tar Heel Update

We’ve related examples of how Republicans here in my home state of North Carolina attempt to tilt the playing field ahead of the upcoming mid-term elections. Those efforts continue apace because no disruptor worth their “Stop The Steal” merch waits until Election Day or the tabulating room afterward. Better to leverage for desired outcomes beforehand. 

We’ll keep this (relatively) brief, as y’all come to this site for political yammering the way buffet chowhounds go for the steamed veggies. [Ed: I disagree, good sir. The Gheorghieverse contains multitudes!] 

The current commotion involves mail-in voting. Thousands of mail-in ballots already have been disqualified because they were deemed improperly sealed, and thousands more are likely to be rejected. North Carolina was the first state to send out mail-in ballots, beginning Sept. 3. That same day, the State Board of Elections issued new rules to county election officials, among them that an unsealed inner envelope was grounds to disqualify the ballot. 

The state has a two-envelope system for mail ballots, implemented in 2023 when it adopted a voter ID requirement. The ballot itself is supposed to be inserted in one envelope, with a copy of the voter’s ID tucked into a sleeve on the outside of that envelope. The first envelope is required to be sealed and then tucked into a second, larger envelope and sealed. 

Prior to this election cycle, mail ballots in which the first envelope wasn’t sealed but the larger envelope was, were counted. No more. This is all supposedly in the name of “election integrity.” A woman named Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s voting rights program, attended a public ballot canvassing meeting in one NC county where officials rejected ballots with unsealed inner envelopes. “There doesn’t appear to be any evidence of tampering or fraud or anything,” she told the New York Times. “From my perspective, they’re just tossing ballots with no evidence of a security issue.” 

President Griftalot has railed against mail-in ballots for years, especially after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, claiming with zero evidence that they are subject to tampering and fraud. Trump’s critics say that he’s targeted mail ballots because more Democrats vote by mail than Republicans. Indeed, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data and Science Lab found that 37 percent of Democrats voted by mail in 2024, compared to 24 percent of Republicans. The gap was wider during the pandemic year of 2020, when 60 percent of Democrats voted by mail, compared to 32 percent of Republicans. The non-partisan States United Democracy Center, in a study of primary voting in ten states, found that 26 percent of Democrats voted by mail, compared to 18 percent of Republicans in 2024. 

In a purple state such as North Carolina, where recent Presidential and U.S. Senate elections have been decided by the slimmest of margins, it becomes statistically advantageous for Republicans to reject mail-in ballots in the belief that it will eliminate a larger swath of Democrat votes. GOP disenfranchisement is simply collateral damage and the price of doing business. 

It goes without saying that we’ll be better off when Trump and his coterie of supplicant jizzpuddles* exit the stage. The fear is that the movement he spawned and the mechanisms in place – courts packed with compliant judges on lifetime appointment, state and local election boards increasingly staffed by 2020 election deniers and proponents of the Big Lie, partisan legislative bodies hamstrung by design – will break our system and outlast us all.

* Supplicant Jizzpuddles is the name of Dooger's Swedish Death Metal collective