NC 3 north caro

estb 12 24 2 two nodes

SEE NEWBY STATE SCOTUS GERRYSTRIP GOV?

see sea level rise fox jrnl fail

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mfg bs

The News Observer reports President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick were quick to announce a new manufacturing plant in North Carolina that would provide raw materials for semiconductors — perhaps too quick.

The Observer reports Sibelco, the mineral company that Lutnick said was behind the new plant, hasn’t confirmed any details of the federal officials’ announcement.

Trump is eager to sell his policies to South Carolina voters because Republicans are fighting for their political lives in a state the party was expecting to dominate without effort. But, aside from ‘closing the border,’ there are relatively few Trump policies that are resonating with Americans.

With his talking points running thin, Trump and Lutnick were quick to announce the groundbreaking of a factory to bolster a global hub for mining in Western North Carolina, which the Observer said produces 70 percent to 90 percent of the world’s high purity quartz — a key raw material in semiconductor and solar panel manufacturing.

However, a Sibelco spokesperson told The News & Observer that the company is only “aware of recent public comments regarding a potential project involving the company in North Carolina.”

“At this time, we are awaiting the official communication from the U.S. Government and are therefore not in a position to comment or provide information beyond what has been publicly announced through official channels,” the spokesperson said. “Should further information be announced, Sibelco will share relevant details through its communications channels.”

The setback comes as the president’s standing continues to plummet among working Americans. Trump promised when he ran for reelection in 2024 that he would revitalize American jobs, particularly in traditionally masculine industries like manufacturing. Yet according to a report by a business journalist, that's just not what's happening.

"The White House promised a manufacturing renaissance,” wrote Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg. “Instead, the factory floor keeps shrinking."

The journalist added that "the blue-collar job market has been slowing for more than a year, with jobs in manufacturing and construction racking up roughly 150,000 net losses on an annual basis as of March… During Trump's first year back in the White House, the manufacturing sector alone shed 108,000 jobs — even as the administration touted an incoming 'manufacturing boom.'"

While campaigning in 2024, Trump also pledged to eliminate the entire national debt in just one term. He also claimed he’d do it without cutting “one penny” from Social Security or Medicare. Instead, he suggested that he would eliminate the debt through growth, crypto, and tariffs.But according to Atlantic columnist David Frum, not only were Trump’s “absurd” plans little more than “fantasies,” but the bill has come due with potentially disastrous consequences.

Instead, Frum said Trump’s tax cuts reduced government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, and his cuts to food stamps and Medicaid reduced spending by just $1.1 trillion. Meanwhile, Trump’s budget plans generated $3.4 trillion in direct costs over the decade ahead — and this grows to $4.1 trillion because of the rising costs of debt service in the Trump era.

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Political showdown in NC as HOAs ban election signs

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President Donald Trump won North Carolina three times, yet as Democrats seem poised to take the state's Senate seat in the upcoming midterm election, Republicans are going to great lengths to cling to power — including by limiting voting opportunity for North Carolina's African American community.

"North Carolina’s state board of elections once again refused to provide an accessible early voting location at North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black college or university," reported Democracy Docket's Natalie Hausmann on Thursday. "With student activists in the front row, the GOP-controlled board rejected student pleas for an on-campus polling place in November’s general election during a Thursday vote."

Hausmann added, "Earlier this year, the board voted along party lines to deny students a voting site on their campus. Brian Kennedy of Democracy North Carolina told Democracy Docket at the time that the vote served as a 'blueprint for what voter suppression across the nation can look like.' Now, it’s happened all over again."

The students were allowed to attend the meeting in which the decision was announced, even though that choice was ultimately made against them. In addition to making it more difficult for African Americans to vote in a state with a long history of segregation and other forms of racial discrimination, the decision is controversial because it specifically targets a voting practice that is disproportionately popular among African American communities.

"The denial followed a series of election board votes to curtail Sunday voting – popular among black voters – across several counties," Hausmann wrote. She went on to quote one of the Democrats on the state board who outright claimed the decision could have been racially motivated.

"Jeff Carmon, one of two Democrats on the state board, said some GOP county plans had 'racial undertones,'" Hausmann reported. "'Can we identify a single voter who is better served by having fewer opportunities to cast a ballot?' Carmon asked at the start of the meeting."

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Despite what furious North Carolina Republicans might say, N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson says he follows a strict checklist before prosecuting a target — and none of it involves partisanship.

“We use an objective criteria here,” the Democratic AG told Spectrum News 1. “It’s, ‘Did someone break the law?’ ‘Did they hurt the state?’ And, ‘Can I prove both of those things?’ And if I can check all three of those boxes, we’re going to take you to court.”

That checklist, so far, has put President Donald Trump in Jackson’s sights for a total of 25 lawsuits, and his office has confirmed he’s already won 10 — despite Trump being only hallway through his term. The others are still pending except for one Jackson agreed to dismiss.

Spectrum News said Jackson walloped Trump on The Federal Emergency Management Agency's cancellation of $200 million in disaster preparedness grants, the halting of AmeriCorps program’s funding and the cut-off of more than $165 million in Education Department funding, all halted due to successful lawsuits that Jackson involved himself in.

Even more of Jackson's successful litigation involves restoring food assistance during the nation’s longest federal government shutdown last year, reports Spectrum News. At that time, Trump tried to punish Democrats (and Americans) by freezing the nation’s largest food aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, claiming the program had “run out of money” due to Democrats’ refusal to fund Trump's controversial budget.

Dozens of Democratic-led states took the administration to court — Jackson among them — arguing that contingency funds could fund the benefits. A series of favorable lower-court rulings soon prompted states to issue full or partial SNAP benefits before the government even reopened.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis, speaking to Spectrum News, argued that President Trump’s obliging conservative U.S. Supreme Court, filled with Republican-appointed justices, has delivered favorable decisions to Trump “over 20 times,” and she called lower court rulings against the White House “lawless.”

“The Administration’s policies have been consistently upheld as lawful, despite some lower courts issuing an unprecedented number of lawless injunctions,” said Bis, a former communications director of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, known for suing states to purge voters from election rolls. “Instead of bragging about filing frivolous lawsuits against the Trump Administration, these radical Democrat State AGs should focus on addressing problems in their own states — like the countless criminal illegal aliens Democrats allow to roam free and terrorize innocent Americans.”

But while Jackson keeps racking up wins against Trump, state Republicans complain he spends too much time suing the president. North Carolina Senate Republicans even passed legislation that would have barred him from initiating lawsuits against the president over executive orders had the bill not stalled in the state House.

Jackson, meanwhile, is unapologetic about his belt notches.

“I think it’s hard to say that against someone who is so far undefeated. I think that our record speaks for itself,” said Jackson.

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ELECTION FUCKERY? CT LOSS 2 26 AN

Republicans just suffered a significant setback in North Carolina ahead of this fall's midterm elections, where they're hoping to stop Democrats from flipping a crucial U.S. Senate seat.

NBC News reported Monday that a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the North Carolina Republican Party — which alleged roughly 250,000 voters were improperly registered — resulted in the court allowing 73,000 voters to remain on the rolls while presenting identifying information.

Republicans were hoping to have all voters in question removed and their 2024 ballots thrown out after alleging that their voter registrations didn't include the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers or a statement that they had neither document. Democrats countersued on behalf of North Carolina election officials, resulting in Monday's settlement granting extra time to the group of 73,000 voters.

According to NBC News, the North Carolina Board of Elections began updating its database of voter registrations last year, sending letters to roughly 82,000 voters asking them to update their registrations. Approximately 100,000 voters in the Tar Heel State lack identifiers like a driver's license number. Because North Carolina requires voters show ID when voting, the settlement allows for the 73,000 voters in question to present ID when casting their ballots, upon which election officials will update their information on state voter rolls with the information shown on those voters' identifications.

Had those ballots been tossed, it could have potentially changed the outcome of one or more U.S. House elections. According to the Associated Press' vote count, Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) narrowly won his race in North Carolina's 1st Congressional District by roughly 6,300 votes. And the statewide vote count could also prove decisive with Monday's settlement, as President Donald Trump only won North Carolina by 183,000 votes in 2024.

"This latest victory is a win for Americans and yet another blow to the Republicans’ scheme to disenfranchise voters ahead of the midterm elections," Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said in a statement.

North Carolina voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. However, North Carolina voters also elected Democrat Roy Cooper to the governorship in 2016 and 2020, and elected Democrat Josh Stein as governor in 2024. Cooper is now running for North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat, where he and former RNC chairman Michael Whatley are favored to win the March 3 primary. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C,.) is retiring from the Senate and not seeking a third term.

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AN 11 25

It’s been a hallmark of most of the noteworthy political movements that have emerged and risen to power in modern times that their leaders aspired to use government power to improve society. Plenty of these movements were deeply flawed or downright fraudulent, but virtually all – even some of the worst authoritarian parties and leaders –have at least professed to have a plan for using the levers of power in an intentional way to make life better for average people.

Here in the U.S., until recently, even archconservatives who opposed many social welfare programs were still committed to strengthening the national defense in order to help defend the nation and its allies against foreign adversaries, and to boosting basic components of societal infrastructure that they saw as aiding in that effort — like public education, transportation and public health.

Weirdly and disturbingly, however, this is not the case with the MAGA movement. While it’s true that Donald Trump regularly dispenses absurd and delusional promises to magically solve every societal ill – promises that not even his most ardent supporters take seriously – when it comes to fashioning a real agenda for getting things done, the modern right is consistently and harmfully silent.

Indeed, save for their efforts to: a) enhance state police power vis a vis immigrant communities and women seeking to control their own reproduction, and b) strengthen their own capacity to remain in power through gerrymandering and election-rigging tactics, it’s clear that the main objective of MAGA conservatives when it comes to public structures is tearing things down.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in North Carolina where, after a decade and a half of conservative Republican dominance in state government, it’s virtually impossible to identify any public system or structure – public and higher education, public health, environmental protection, transportation, courts and corrections — in which things are demonstrably better than they were at the start of GOP rule.

And nowhere is this sad pattern better exemplified today in North Carolina than in the current destructive budget stalemate between conservative leaders at the General Assembly.

North Carolina is now almost five months into the 2025-26 fiscal year, and it continues to operate without a new state budget. As a result, numerous core public structures and systems – perhaps most notably, its already fragile and dramatically under-resourced Medicaid health insurance program – are operating under old law and old, inadequate appropriations.

Mind you, this is not – as an outsider might superficially surmise – the result of a conflict between the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and its Democratic governor.

No, in this case, GOP legislative leaders never even passed a comprehensive budget bill for Democratic Gov. Josh Stein to consider. Instead, the state is being held hostage to their internal disputes over how drastically and rapidly to further eviscerate the state’s regressive and inadequate income tax structure, as well as a series of other mostly petty matters – like Senate Leader Phil Berger’s need to appear sufficiently reactionary as he tries to fend off a far-right Republican primary challenger in 2026.

Gov. Stein has done his best to break the logjam and direct public attention to the destructive impact the stalemate is having – particularly on the Medicaid program, where the lack of funding certainty has forced his Health and Human Services department to slash reimbursements to providers to maintain program solvency. Earlier this month, he took the extraordinary step of calling lawmakers to Raleigh for a special legislative session to address the rapidly metastasizing problem that is likely to soon lead to preventable deaths of people no longer able to access health care.

It was precisely the kind of strong and common-sense leadership that North Carolinians undoubtedly expected when they elected Stein by a wide margin last November. The session was supposed to have commenced on Monday.

Unfortunately, legislative leaders were unmoved. Much like the Republicans in Washington who, despite their control of both Congress and the White House, allowed their own internal conflicts to translate into a record-breaking federal government shutdown and huge new health insurance rate hikes for millions of Americans, state Senate and House leaders have simply ignored Stein’s directive and, in true Trumpian fashion, tried to disavow blame for the Medicaid crisis that their own failure to act has created.

And so, it appears that, absent a hard-to-imagine political 180, Republican leaders will stick to their plan to hold no further votes during the on-again, off-again 2025 legislative session, thereby allowing the Medicaid program – and dozens of other vitally important public structures and services — to wither on the vine while thousands of North Carolinians needlessly suffer.

And once again, instead of coming together to intentionally use the levers of government power to make life better for the many, Republican leaders will, in true MAGA fashion, remain committed to a do-nothing agenda for which the only discernible unifying principles are dysfunction and cruelty.

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mma

Fox ignores climate change while covering collapsing houses along the North Carolina coast

:{SpecialPrograms Climate & Energy:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

Written by Ilana Berger

Published09/19/25

During a September 18 segment, Fox & Friends covered the most recent instance of a house collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean — this time on Hatteras Island in North Carolina — and mentioned erosion along the coast, but left out that climate change is contributing to the problem. Sea-level rise and erosion from increasingly severe storms has helped claim 11 other homes in the unincorporated community of Rodanthe, North Carolina.

Video

Citation

From the September 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

CARLEY SHIMKUS (CO-HOST): A stilt house collapsing on the shore along the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week. It's now the 12th home claimed by the Atlantic Ocean in the past five years. The two-story beach home fell at the north end of Hatteras Island. Thankfully, the home was empty at the time. Officials say recent storms have worsened erosion, leading to more collapses like this. Those are your headlines, guys. Huge home.

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): It's interesting they let them just collapse. They don't destroy them before, knowing this is going to happen.

SHIMKUS: Yeah, that's right. And clearly the ocean is moving up the shore or they wouldn't have built that home in the first place.

EARHARDT: It's a big problem. It's a big problem on the East Coast. And you spend so much to have that beachfront property and then, you know — over time, it's gone.

SHIMKUS: It is, yes.

The Charlotte Observer correctly implicated the role of climate change in its reporting on the home’s destruction, highlighting that Hurricane Erin in August generated “waves as high as 50 feet,” causing “severe erosion in some places along the East Coast.”

The Observer noted that “the home was well away from the ocean and behind a vegetated dune when it was built in 1969. But a series of storms, which have occurred more frequently in recent years due to climate change, carved away the beach and the dune and brought the surf up to the pilings of the home and a string of others to its north and south.”

While the Fox & Friends segment mentioned that worsening storms “have caused erosion,” the network has repeatedly downplayed any connections between hurricanes and climate change, which has been making storms grow rapidly and more intense, destroying homes and businesses. Fox has also downplayed the threat of sea level rise, which occurs “mostly due to a combination of melt water from glaciers and ice sheets and thermal expansion of seawater as it warms,” according to NASA.

As FactCheck.org pointed out, “For every inch of sea level rise, approximately 100 inches of beach are lost, according to NASA oceanographer and climate scientist Josh Willis.”

Trump’s Department of Energy recently published a so-called “critical review” of climate science, which included several climate contrarians as authors and “cherry-picks text, data, and studies that paint an incomplete picture” in order “to suggest rising sea-levels in the US are only due to land-sinking,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The DOE report uses limited information to claim that there is “no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.”

Meanwhile, members of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which manages the coastal area that was impacted, told The Charlotte Observer that “there are probably dozens of homes endangered on the oceanfront.”

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'Throwing out votes': Trump DOJ sues NC elections board — recalling failed election lawsuit

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Revealed: Fear of extremists forced emergency workers to flee a rural disaster zone

A resident walks through debris following the passing of Hurricane Helene, in Marshall, North Carolina, U.S., October 8, 2024. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo

Jordan Greenand Raw Story June 27, 2025

Late one night last October, at a church in a remote corner of Yancey County, North Carolina, government emergency medical workers participating in the response to Hurricane Helene gathered medications, records, laptops and radios, threw them into backpacks — and abandoned their field clinic.

More than two weeks after the massive storm ravaged the region, roads were badly damaged. Led by an ambulance, side lights illuminating the winding two-lane highway that follows Big Creek, the group made its way across the state line and into Tennessee.

Rumors about armed militia members threatening teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency had prompted FEMA to pause some operations. The same day in Rutherford County, roughly 70 miles from the field clinic in Yancey County, a 44-year-old man armed with an assault rifle was arrested for threatening to harm FEMA workers. In Tennessee, a sheriff said witnesses reported FEMA workers being harassed by armed people.

But the Oct. 12-13 evacuation of a state medical assistance team, including FEMA contract workers, on the order of a program director more than 250 miles away in the state capital, Raleigh, is being reported by Raw Story for the first time.

“It was late enough the community had gone to sleep,” said a FEMA contract worker who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We had a rotating cadre of [sheriff’s] deputies … They said, ‘We’re willing to set up an overnight guard.’

"The state medical team was like, ‘No, we’re not going to stay.’”

‘They know where you’re sleeping’

On Oct. 12, as darkness gathered, Dr. Tripp Winslow, medical director for the state Office of Emergency Medical Services (OEMS) and physician for the Yancey County site, paced in the parking lot at Big Creek Free Will Baptist Church.

A medic had delivered an alarming report — of observing snipers on rooftops and viewing a social media post indicating militias were hunting FEMA.

In another part of the parking lot, three unfamiliar men approached. One inquired about the medics’ sleeping accommodations. A FEMA contract worker told Raw Story one man wore a shirt bearing the insignia of Savage Freedoms, an armed volunteer disaster response group that had become a focal point of medical workers’ concerns.

“I mentioned to Dr. Winslow: ‘We had these three people come up, and they know where we sleep. They know we’re not in the clinic at night,’” the worker told Raw Story.

“The state was like, ‘We’re not comfortable with you guys staying here, especially now that they know where you’re sleeping.’”....

NC scotus purge vets

'What it looks like to fight': NC judge demands justice for military and overseas voters

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'At-risk voters': Military servicemembers among 260 votes Republican panel threw out in NC election

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Bipartisan group of lawmakers file brief opposing Republican in NC Supreme Court election dispute

Alex Henderson

myers is trump judge

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At the request of GOP Judge Jefferson Griffin, Republicans on the state Supreme Court have prohibited the state Board of Elections from certifying Democratic Justice Allison Riggs’ election.

Riggs, the incumbent, leads Griffin by 734 votes in the election for a seat on the state’s highest court.

Griffin, an Appeals Court judge, wants to discount more than 60,000 votes on the belief that throwing them out will allow him to win.

After the state Board of Elections dismissed his election protests last month, Griffin asked the Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-2 majority, to step in.

The state Board had the case transferred to federal court, but on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II sent it back to state court.

Tuesday’s order for a temporary stay said the state Supreme Court received notice that the state Board plans to appeal Myers’ decision, but “in the absence of a stay from federal court, this matter should be addressed expeditiously because it concerns certification of an election.”

Democratic Justice Anita Earls dissented, writing that the standards for a temporary stay have not been met.

Riggs has recused herself from participation in the case.

Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years. The Republican Party used the same argument last year in a lawsuit seeking to have more than 225,000 voters purged from the registration rolls or to be forced to cast provisional ballots. Myers partially dismissed that suit.

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com.

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One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.

The state election board dismissed a previous version of the challenge, which is now being considered in federal court. Before the election, a Trump-appointed judge denied an attempt by the Republican National Committee to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls based on the same theory.

The latest case is getting attention statewide and across the country. But it has not yet been reported that members of the group that had helped publicize the idea had cast doubt on its legality.

“I don’t comment on pending litigation,” Griffin wrote to ProPublica in response to a detailed list of questions. “It would be a violation of our code of judicial conduct.”

Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, disputed the challenge and called on Griffin to concede. “It’s not appropriate for this election to be decided in court, period. NC voters have already made the decision to send Justice Riggs back to the Supreme Court,” she said.

The theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.

State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack that those details.

Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot — most often with a driver’s license. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in response to the RNC lawsuit.

Bob Orr, a former GOP state Supreme Court justice who left the Republican Party in 2021, said he too doubts the theory. “I appreciate fighting for every vote: If you honestly think illegal votes have been cast, it’s legitimate to try to prove that,” he said. “But the bottom line is: Did anyone vote illegally? Have you been able to prove one person voted illegally? At this point, no. And we’re weeks past the election and multiple recounts, and there’s no evidence of that.”

In modern history, the state board’s decision on who wins elections has been final, said Chris Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. That includes an even tighter race in 2020, when a Democratic justice conceded to a Republican after protesting her 401-vote loss to the board.

“We’re used to close elections, we’re used to protests, we’re used to candidates pushing every legal action up to the point the state election board rules,” Cooper said. But, he added, there is an important difference with Griffin’s petition, which goes beyond the state election board to the courts.

“This is basically saying the state elections system is wrong, and we’re going to court to try to change the rules of the game after the game has been played — which is unprecedented.”

In July 2024, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network convened online to plan its efforts ahead of the presidential election. Worried about a surge of voter registrations from nonwhite voters who they believed would back Democrats, the activists discussed how to assemble a “suspicious voters list” of people whose ballots they could challenge.

Then, one of the group’s board members, Jay DeLancy, said he had another idea “that’s a lot slicker.”

DeLancy said that if a candidate lost a close election, the loss could be overturned by questioning the validity of voters whose registrations are missing their driver’s license and Social Security information. “Those are illegal votes,” he claimed. “I would file a protest.”

Jim Womack, the leader of the chapter, immediately pushed back: “That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.”

Later in the call Womack said, “I’m 100% sure you’re not going to get a successful prosecution.” And he told the group, “That’s considered to be voter suppression, and there’s no way a court is going to find that way.”

But DeLancy asked for backup from the originator of that theory: Carol Snow. She argued that her theory could in fact overturn the outcome of an election.

“I guess we’re gonna find that out,” Snow said.

Snow is a leader of the conservative activist group North Carolina Audit Force and lives in the state’s rural mountains. After Trump’s loss in 2020, she threw herself into questioning the election’s results. In 2022, she accompanied a pair of far-right activists to a North Carolina election office where the two men unsuccessfully tried to forcefully access voting machines, and she participated in a failed pressure campaign to oust the election director who resisted them, ProPublica previously reported.

She also began filing overwhelming numbers of records requests and complaints to state election officials, an effort that Womack praised on the July call: “I think Carol has shown a way of really harassing — not that we want to do it for harassment purposes — but really needling the Board of Elections to do their jobs by just constantly deluging them.”

Since late 2021, the state elections board had spent far more time on her requests and complaints than those of any other individual, spokesperson Patrick Gannon said in a statement. “Ms. Snow’s constant barrage of requests and complaints causes other priorities and responsibilities to suffer,” Gannon said.

Snow described her work to ProPublica as “simply taking the time to learn about my state’s electoral process” and acting for the public good. “The records I’ve requested are owned by the public. In other words, I’m asking for what belongs to me,” Snow wrote to ProPublica. “If government agencies are understaffed and unable to comply with this state’s Public Records law, they should address the issue with the entities that fund them.”

In the fall of 2023, Snow filed a complaint alleging that North Carolina’s voter registration form did not clearly require voters to provide their driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, as required by federal law — instead that information was coded as optional. Snow later described the missing information as a “line of attack” through which bad actors could cast fraudulent votes using fake identities. (A right-wing conspiracy theory holds that this was how Biden won the 2020 election.)

But she was not able to demonstrate that the missing information had led to anyone improperly voting. After obtaining public records for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, Snow provided the state board with only seven examples of what she called potential double voting. The state board found all seven to be innocuous things like data entry errors.

The state board quickly updated the form to require the information. But from late 2023 through the fall of 2024, six complaints, some of which were partly based on Snow’s theory, were filed with the state election board. Aside from the updates to the form, the state board dismissed the complaints.

By the time of the July call, some of Snow’s peers seemed dismissive as well.

“I’m not suggesting that we can’t arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest using this,” Womack said on the call. “But I would just suggest to you that that’s not the way to win on this thing.”

Yet the information did end up in the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit trying to disqualify 225,000 voters, a challenge DeLancy filed against Riggs’ victory in North Carolina’s most populous county, and, the day after that was dismissed, Griffin’s challenge to over 60,000 voters.

DeLancy wrote to ProPublica that he filed the challenge on his own and did not coordinate with Griffin. He also said he disagreed with Womack’s description of such challenges as “voter suppression.” Instead, he said, he saw it as “a proper response” to the state election board’s “violation of federal law.” “Carol Snow deserves an Order of the Long Leaf Pine for exposing this treasonous behavior on the part of the election officials,” he wrote, referring to an award bestowed by North Carolina’s governor.

Womack wrote to ProPublica that the group he leads “is a non-partisan, neutral organization” that does “not favor one party over another.”

He also said that recordings of the group’s calls are “prohibited and violate our internal policies” and “whatever bootleg recording you may have is unauthorized and may well be altered.” ProPublica has seen a video recording of the call and verified portions of it with some participants.

Though Griffin’s challenge of Riggs’ victory is now being considered in federal court, legal experts say it could still end up back where he intended: in front of the state Supreme Court.

Griffin’s petition is making what experts describe as extreme asks to the Supreme Court: to allow him to bypass the lower courts, to allow ballots to be thrown out without proving that voters did anything knowingly wrong and to essentially decide whether to change its composition to six Republicans and one Democrat.

“Even if they do their best to be open-minded and independent, the facts of the potential conflicts of interest are just too obvious to the public,” said Orr, the former Republican justice.

Griffin has described Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and Newby promoted Griffin’s 2020 run for the court of appeals. What’s more, a ProPublica review of campaign finance reports show that the spouses of three justices, including Newby’s wife, donated over $12,000 to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns. (The husband of the Supreme Court’s other Democratic justice donated to Riggs.)

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to spokespeople for the Supreme Court.

When announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court, Griffin declared, “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

A cartoon illustration that hangs in the Supreme Court depicts all the Republican appellate jurists as superheroes from the Justice League, with Newby caricatured as Superman and Griffin as the Flash.

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Dec 11th, 2024

Republicans Want To ‘Throw Out’ Thousands Of Votes In North Carolina Supreme Court Race

With House Veto Override Vote, North Carolina Republicans’ Power Grab Is Complete

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In the 2024 election, many North Carolina voters were willing to split their ticket.

President-elect Donald Trump carried the state, but Democratic North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein defeated far-right GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson and will be sworn in as governor in 2025.

North Carolina, a swing state, will have two Democratic governors in a row. But outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper and other North Carolina Democrats are slamming Republicans in the state legislature for making a "power grab" via Senate Bill 382 — which limits Stein's powers as governor in a variety of ways.

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For one thing, SB 382 prevents Gov.-elect Stein from appointing members of the North Carolina Board of Elections and moves that power to GOP Auditor-elect Dave Boliek.

Cooper, during a Tuesday, December 3 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," slammed the bill as an egregious "power grab." And Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern has been equally critical of North Carolina Republicans and SB 382.

In a scathing post on X, formerly Twitter, Stern wrote, "This is a hugely corrupt power grab by the North Carolina General Assembly's Republican supermajority, seizing authority from the governor and the courts to prevent any meaningful check on legislative abuses. Authoritarian stuff. A really dark day for democracy in N.C."

SB 382 also prevents Rachel Hunt, North Carolina's lieutenant governor-elect, from chairing committees on energy issues.

Mayor Barbara Foushee and city council members from the town of 21,000 located immediately west of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus pointed fingers at Duke Energy for knowing about the dangers associated with climate change but failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

This marks the first lawsuit of its kind, in which a town is seeking action against a utility company in this manner, Foushee said. It was filed in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough. The state of Vermont passed law earlier this year that requires fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change.

“We’re bringing this lawsuit because taking care of our town, each other, and our climate is at the center of everything we do here in Carrboro,” Foushee said. “The climate crisis is causing tremendous harm to our community’s health and well-being.”

The suit seeks “compensation for the damages (both past and future) that it is incurring as a direct and proximate result of Duke’s campaign of deception and resulting exacerbation of the climate crisis” — damages that the suit estimates will total in the millions of dollars.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Duke Energy said, “We are in the process of reviewing the complaint. Duke Energy is committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible.”

Suppressing a long-known truth

Top executives at Duke Energy have known about the risks of fossil fuels for more than 50 years, according to the lawsuit. But that didn’t stop the company from a “widespread campaign” to misinform the public about its effects on the environment, the complaint argues.

An example of this deception occurred when one of Duke’s predecessor entities, Cinergy, released an annual report in 2004 claiming there was “an unresolved but robust debate on the ‘science’ of global warming.” The lawsuit points out how “science” is placed in quotation marks even though Cinergy and Duke were aware of the causes and consequences of climate change.

The lawsuit points out that “North Carolina has just suffered its hottest year on record, and temperatures for the region may increase as much as 6°-10°F by the end of the century.”

Climate change, it states, has also contributed to extreme weather events, like Hurricane Helene, which wreaked catastrophic damage across communities in western North Carolina earlier this year.

“For far too long, corporations like Duke Energy have prioritized their executives’ personal fortunes at the expense of our communities, our planet and our collective well-being,” Mayor Pro Tem Danny Nowell said.

Based in Charlotte, Duke Energy provides electricity to more than eight million customers in six states and natural gas to around two million customers in five states. With a near-monopoly in North Carolina, the company is one of the country’s largest operators of coal and natural gas power plants.

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ranked Duke Energy as the nation’s third-biggest emitter of gases responsible for climate change on the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index.

Taxpayers aren’t funding the lawsuit, Foushee said. A nonprofit organization is covering the legal fees.

Council member Randee Haven-O’Donnell said Carrboro has made efforts to mitigate climate change since the 1970s, aiming to protect the area’s natural surroundings and ecosystems.

The actions of Duke Energy, however, have set that process backwards.

“We’ve been working hard and in earnest to protect our climate, and the giant utility has been deceiving us,” she said. “Duke Energy’s deceptive public information campaign has been working against us, erasing the progress we’ve urgently been striving to make to address climate change.”

Echoing findings of a recent nonprofit’s exposé

The allegations in the lawsuit about the knowledge that Duke and its predecessors possessed decades ago and then subsequently suppressed, echo findings detailed in a lengthy report prepared by Sue Sturgis, Research and Communications Manager for the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute entitled “Duke Energy Knew: Documenting the Utility’s Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception About Climate Change.”

According to the report, which was released in November, warnings about greenhouse-gas-induced climate change from Duke’s corporate predecessors date as far back as 1968 and were regularly touted in the 1970’s as justification for efforts to expand nuclear power.

Later on, Sturgis wrote — particularly in the 1980’s and 90’s as nuclear power fell from favor — warnings about CO2 emission and climate change became muted or disappeared.

In an interview with NC Newsline for an upcoming edition of the radio show/podcast, News & Views, Sturgis described the sequence events:

“And then, when the consensus around the science really came together in the late 1980’s we saw both the Duke utilities and also the industry associations that they were involved in pivot at that point, in order to protect their business model. They realized that if they were saying that…the climate problem was going to cause difficulties for their business model…they moved away from that message. Rather than change their business model, they said, ‘well, maybe we’re not so certain about the science, after all.” And so that’s really when we saw them selling the denial.”

Click here to explore Sturgis’ report. Read the Carrboro lawsuit below:

Carrboro-climate-lawsuit