Crying Wolf in Raleigh


Summary:

  • Republicans are laying the groundwork to cry “fraud” again this fall
  • North Carolina’s election administration is extremely secure
  • The far-right has become highly dependent on “Big Lie” mythology

As North Carolina barrels toward yet another nail-biter of an election season, one tell-tale sign of the season has arrived: baseless grumbling about “voter fraud.” Both in the form campaign press releases, and in lawsuits that serve the same purpose, the NCGOP is laying the groundwork to revive the same old warmed-over stories about “voter fraud” that they’ve raised for years. That is only, of course, if they lose – curiously, concerns about “voter fraud” only seem to exist when one party wins.

In today’s far-right circles, “voter fraud” has become a rationalizing mechanism to explain away losses at the ballot box. Recycling them every few years has become a favorite strategy in the Trump-era right, which increasingly seeks to reject the outcomes of any fair election in which they lose. Donald Trump may very well win North Carolina again in 8 days – but if he loses, the NCGOP’s disingenuous mythmaking about “voter fraud” will quickly take center stage in their explanations about why.

Losing in court

Just this year, the NCGOP has filed – with much public ado – multiple lawsuits challenging various aspects of North Carolina’s election administration. These legal challenges range from questioning absentee ballot handling procedures to demanding the purge of nearly a quarter-million legally registered voters from the rolls. These lawsuits have been consistently dismissed in court, with judges finding them either factually unsupported or, in most cases, plainly frivolous.

This follows the normal pattern for “voter fraud” claims. Donald Trump’s own “Big Lie” mythology lost in court over 60 times, often before judges he appointed, due to the total lack of evidence. This has plainly not dissuaded followers of Trump’s cult of personality, who have created an elaborate fictional universe full of conspiracies to keep the enthusiasts entertained.

Though lawsuits alleging fraud have cropped up in many states, they are particularly ironic in North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers themselves have designed and written almost all aspects of North Carolina’s election administration. Having maintained uninterrupted control of the state legislature for 13 years, Republicans have crafted election laws to their exacting specifications many times. Republicans’ “Monster” election law of 2013, which ran to 49 pages, not only set up a voter ID scheme that federal judges later found targeted Black voters “with surgical precision,” but also overhauled how campaigns and elections were administered. 2023’s Senate Bill 747 (running to 43 pages) made large changes to mail-in voting, partisan election observers and same-day registration.

Finally, North Carolina’s elections this year feature a full voter ID requirement, a longtime key demand for Republican critics who insist it will prevent fraud.

Where’s the beef?

What fraud do all these measures seek to prevent? Even the hard-right Heritage Foundation, the conservative D.C. think tank that co-authored the Project 2025 Agenda with Donald Trump’s inner circle, was hardly able to find any evidence of non-citizen voting in a review spanning almost 30 years.

Here in North Carolina, Donald Trump’s own appointed U.S. Attorney spent four years and millions of taxpayer dollars in a sprawling, “dragnet” investigation that seized sensitive voter registration data from 44 counties across the state. All of that effort turned up only a tiny number of improper ballots cast, virtually all of them honest mistakes. By contrast, Republican former Congressman and Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was able to avoid charges of voter fraud for voting at a residence they did not actually own or live in.

Nevertheless, the lawsuits have come, straining credulity that the partisan actors behind them have suddenly discovered new, fundamental flaws in the very system they created and maintained.

We’ve seen this playbook before, most notably in former Governor Pat McCrory’s disgraceful behavior after his narrow loss in 2016 to Roy Cooper. Despite clear evidence that he lost the election fairly, as confirmed later by multiple recounts, Pat McCrory immediately cried “fraud” as the only reason he could’ve possibly lost the election. McCrory never publicly retracted, much less apologized, for those claims, or for his personal role in eroding the public trust in North Carolina’s elections system.

In fact, the only clear-cut recent case of election fraud in North Carolina was perpetrated by a very prominent Republican politician. In 2018, Republican Mark Harris’s campaign orchestrated a ballot fraud scheme that nearly succeeded in stealing a Congressional seat. Harris’s fraud was quickly forgiven, though. Bizarrely casting himself as a victim, Harris is headed to Congress from a newly gerrymandered district in 2025.

Either candidate could win fairly

The presidential race in North Carolina, like many battleground states, has suggested a virtual tie between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for the last three months. Both candidates have roughly equal odds of victory. Yet since Trump’s 2020 election loss, the “Big Lie” mythology has become an article of faith for many in the hard-right MAGA movement. Polling today suggests that as many as two-thirds of the Republican base still insist the 2020 election was “stolen,” suggesting that future losses will be met with similar denialism – evidence be damned.

Of course, bad-faith actors are what they are because they act in bad faith. Very few of the serious people in Raleigh, even Republicans, actually believe that North Carolina, or America in general, has a real problem with voter fraud – mostly because we don’t. But many are willing to engage in acts of performative concern as a form of political theater for the MAGA base, whose support is increasingly essential in Republican primaries. This is the real intended audience for the NCGOP’s lawsuits, and for protestations of concern on the issue. If Trump and other Republicans do lose this November, expect that theater to ramp up in a big way. Some people just want their favorite band to play the old hits.