On Thursday, Republican judges on the state Court of Appeals threw out a century of precedent to help their party seize control of our elections. It’s time to speak up or forever hold your peace.
This is what a very sick democracy looks like, North Carolina.
On Thursday, we learned that a Republican-controlled state appeals court, without even going through the motions of hearing oral arguments or writing an explanation, threw out a trial court decision and gave their party permission to rewrite the way we conduct elections in North Carolina.
North Carolina news. No apologies. No performative objectivity. Sign up Cardinal & Pine’s free, award-winning newsletter.
For a century, the power to appoint people to the Board of Elections has been held more or less by the governor of North Carolina. But with Republicans struggling to win elections for governor—they’ve lost the last three, including in 2024 to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein—they simply rewrote the laws, defied the state Constitution’s separation of powers, and in effect gave it to themselves.
More specifically, they gave the appointment power to State Auditor Dave Boliek, who campaigned with Trump in 2024 and did his party duty Thursday, taking just minutes to rebuild the elections board in Republicans’ image, even with Stein appealing the case to higher courts.
It’s not about Boliek or what his office does. It’s about his party affiliation. If we had an official state dogcatcher and they were a Republican, lawmakers would have justified giving election powers to that office too.
Today, Republican judges handed over elections to the same GOP lawmakers who’ve gerrymandered themselves into a practically “forever majority,” the people who crafted “the most gerrymandered state” in the nation.
In their 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote that democracies don’t always fall down with a boom, like when Adolf Hitler used the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany to seize power.
“More often,” they wrote, “democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.”
These are those barely visible steps.
They’re taken by unknowns like Dave Boliek and the Republican judges on NC’s Court of Appeals who issued this order, an order they didn’t even put their names to, and by the Republican judges who, in an earlier order, moved to disqualify tens of thousands of North Carolina voters because those voters didn’t vote for Republicans.
The endgame isn’t just to throw out Jefferson Griffin’s loss in the 2024 NC Supreme Court race and greenlight more gerrymandering, although those are likely the first steps. It’s to control elections in perpetuity, to hell with checks and balances.
We travel down the slipperiest of slopes, North Carolina. We’re not just a test case. We are the test case.
North Carolina is a truly “purple” state, split between the left and the right, but the lion’s share of the power is held by the right.
Not because of the NC Republican Party’s broad appeal to North Carolina voters, but because of its willingness to pry loose the floorboards, break the windows, and take a sledgehammer to the foundation of our democracy. Their success lies in their willingness to creep into the smallest cracks in our Constitution and exploit it to their ends.
Their strength is in their corruption and shamelessness. Their genius is in their venality.
Donald Trump could only dream of being as cruelly efficient and anti-democratic as these North Carolina Republicans.
Too often there is a helpless feeling in this state, a feeling that you can rage and seethe but nothing is achievable. It is the natural outcome of our elected leaders dismantling political solutions, as North Carolina Republicans have spent the last 15 years doing.
But there is a point to your anger.
In the coming days, you can show them that you won’t let these “barely visible steps” pass with us doomscrolling on our phones or whatever else we do to distract ourselves from the fire in front of us. To show them that no matter our age, where we come from, what we like or do, we have the courage to care.
We can show these corrupt politicians that we will speak in the streets, that we will bring every camera, every eye to North Carolina and point it directly at them. Daylight, no matter what, no matter where, is a good thing. It’s not a liberal or a conservative thing. It’s an American thing.
So speak now, North Carolina, or as they say, forever hold your peace.
