This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.

The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.

The votes that Griffin has challenged fall into three groups. Most are from North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Although this is now required by law, these voters registered using old forms that did not require either; the state never asked these voters to reregister. The second set belongs to overseas residents who have never lived in the state, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad; state law entitles them to vote in-state. A third consists of overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn’t submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required.

Griffin doesn’t allege that these voters did anything wrong; in fact, as ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, Griffin himself twice voted under the overseas-voting law while deployed in the National Guard. But now he argues that their votes should be junked for administrative and clerical discrepancies that were not their fault, and he did not express any concerns about these votes until after he appeared to have lost the race.

“What Judge Griffin is asking is for the courts to change the rules of the election after the election has already happened, and for the courts to allow him to hand-select the votes that shouldn’t count, so that he can be declared the winner,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel who works on voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “That is absolutely unprecedented.”

I wrote about the legal wrangling over the election early this year. At the time, the delay seemed long, but I assumed it would be resolved shortly. Instead, it’s now March, and no end is in sight. Griffin petitioned the state supreme court to hear the case directly, skipping over lower courts, but its justices declined. The North Carolina State Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, attempted to move the case to federal court; a federal judge bounced it back to state courts. A trial court then heard the matter and quickly ruled against Griffin. After he appealed, the state board requested that the supreme court bypass the state appeals court and hear the case quickly, but was rebuffed. So now it’s before the appeals court, with no schedule yet set. The federal court could still reclaim the case later, too. (Yes, this is all incredibly confusing. The News & Observer is maintaining a helpful timeline.)

For North Carolina voters, justice delayed is a justice denied. Sweren-Becker told me that Brennan filed an amicus brief on behalf of voters at risk of disenfranchisement, because these people don’t otherwise have a voice in the case as either plaintiff or defendant.

The decision is now essentially up to Republican jurists. The appeals court has a 12–3 GOP majority, though Griffin is recused from the case. Riggs has also asked that Judge Tom Murry be recused, because Murry contributed $5,000 to Griffin’s legal fund in this case, but Griffin has indicated that he’ll oppose the request. Once the appeals court rules, the case may go to the supreme court, where the GOP has a 5–2 majority (and a recent history of intense partisan acrimony); Riggs, too, is recused from this case. Griffin appears to be asking his own party members to hand him a seat—an impression not helped if Murry stays on the case. (Griffin has declined to comment while the case is in court.)

All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”

North Carolina has historically been an early indicator for future national voting battles. It has long seen some of the more preposterous congressional maps in the United States. When the Supreme Court struck part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, North Carolina Republicans moved within hours to change laws. An effort by Republican Governor Pat McCrory to challenge his 2016 election loss presaged Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” push. North Carolina also sent important cases about partisan gerrymandering and the controversial “independent state legislature” theory to the Supreme Court. If Griffin prevails, his playbook could go national as well.

In some ways, the effect of this protracted litigation on the workings of the state is contained. The state supreme court has seven members, and Riggs remains on the court for other cases while hers is resolved. But imagining a case with a more direct impact—say, a governor’s race—isn’t hard. A world in which losing candidates can indefinitely delay the certification of elections with ex post facto challenges is one that could paralyze democratic government. Given the contempt for voters on display here, maybe that’s the point.

Related:

Stop the (North Carolina) steal. Election officials are under siege. (From October 2024)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

American allies don’t trust Trump with their secrets. The advice Elissa Slotkin didn’t take This is what happens when reality TV comes for democracy.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that a range of goods coming from Mexico and Canada will be exempt from his administration’s latest 25 percent tariff until April 2. Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would start the process of dismantling the Department of Education. Ten Democrats voted with House Republicans to censure Representative Al Green, who spoke out in protest during Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Generations of Americans have questioned the role of the wealthy few who govern the many, Russell Berman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

What Alito’s dissent fails to understand Russian state TV is very happy with the Trump administration. The Supreme Court foreign-aid ruling is a bad sign for Trump, Stephen I. Vladeck writes. Why Trump thanked John Roberts What does Dan Bongino believe?

Evening Read

Nina Westervelt / Redux

Cling to Your Disgust

By Spencer Kornhaber

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Pursue happiness. The happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks explains the ultimate German philosophy for a better life.

Examine. Artists’ attempts at activism often meet mockery on social media. One actress figured out a better way to do it, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yesterday, I had some harsh words about directionless Democrats. Today, several members of Congress picked a perplexing direction. The group collaborated on a TikTok video playing on a viral trend based on the video games Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros Melee. (No, the Trump administration still has not followed through on a law forcing the app’s sale.) “Choose your fighter,” the clip says, before the participants—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minority Whip Katherine Clark—stream through, posing as fighters to be selected in the game. Some are less awkward than others, but the whole thing is pretty cringe. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone some harmless fun, but I’m perplexed by the message. While Democrats are asking people to choose their fighter, voters just want Democrats to pick some fights. It doesn’t look like the party is anywhere close to a flawless victory.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.