CBC Editorial: Tuesday, May 1, 2018; Editorial # 8296

The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company

For several weeks after voting in November 2016, the election for North Carolina governor was huge news. With a narrow margin of slightly more than 10,000 votes for Democrat Roy Cooper, Republican incumbent Pat McCrory was desperately seeking to either find more votes for himself or cut the votes for Cooper.

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Typically, campaigns challenge election results because technology failed -- causing votes to be miscounted or disrupting the time and access to the polls.

But 2016 brought a harmful twist. A desperate McCrory claimed massive voter fraud was the cause of his deficit. Cooper’s tally was boosted, McCrory claimed, by “counting the votes of dead people and felons.”

To manufacture proof for the unfounded accusations, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unsuspecting, civic-minded citizens were falsely and irresponsibly accused of election fraud – a felony. Their names and addresses were revealed in their communities, broadcast over the airwaves and printed on the pages of local newspapers. They have gone to court accusing the McCrory campaign and those it hired of defamation, want the record cleared and are asking for monetary damages.

These ordinary citizens should not have their case dismissed -- as the McCrory campaign has asked a judge to do. The plaintiffs' complaints are owed a thorough examination, before the court,

As we’ve now discovered, the McCrory campaign worked with out-of-state lawyers to generate allegations of voter fraud. It appears the allegations were concocted with cursory, if any effort at verification. It is the same kind of thin justifications the General Assembly used to enact unconstitutional restrictions on voter access to the polls and voter ID laws.

Until the election, Guilford County voters Louis M. Bouvier Jr. of Greensboro, Karen Andrea Niehans and Samuel Niehans of Jamestown, or Brunswick County voter Joseph D. Golden of Southport – the main plaintiffs in the case -- were private law-abiding citizens, quietly fulfilling their civic obligation by voting.

After the election they – and hundreds of others like them around the state – suddenly were labeled election cheaters. They were wrongly accused of voting in the same election in two states, voting as convicted felons and thus ineligible to cast ballots, and voting in the names of dead voters.

The McCrory campaign and the Warrenton, Va. law firm Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky – contend there shouldn't be a trial because they followed the legal process of challenging ballots -- regardless of the truth to those challenges.

Are they for real? These plaintiffs aren’t political operatives. Thery are private citizens that were wrongly accused of criminal activity. Their accusers should be held accountable for their actions.

Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour needs to reject the defendants efforts to duck responsibility for their bad behavior. Those who were falsely accused deserve to have their day in court.