David Graham

I think we can see, with the exception of military deployments, many of the possibilities for how a playbook for how you might interfere with national elections.

So in North Carolina, we have seen, for example, efforts for years to suppress votes by doing things like reducing early voting hours or

introducing limited voter ID.

We have seen years of gerrymandering by both parties to try to ensure that elections are slanted, most recently by Republicans who are in power.

We've seen a partisan takeover of the State Board of Elections, replacing a sort of professional election administrator with a Republican lawyer.

And all of these things affect the rules ahead of time.

Then you get to Election Day where you have potential vote suppression.

You have claims of fraud.

So in an election in 2016, we saw lawsuits that were really kind of a harbinger of Trump's claims in 2020, saying there was fraud in major Democratic jurisdictions without providing a lot of evidence of that.

And then in 2024, we saw a state Supreme Court race in which the Democratic incumbent won a narrow but solid victory.

And her Republican opponent attempted to get thousands of votes thrown out.

Everyone agreed that the voters had followed rules, but believed that the.

Their registrations were invalid because of officials' errors, wanted these votes thrown out, and almost was successful in the state court system getting fellow Republican judges to rule for him.

And it was only stopped when a federal court ruled against him, and that was when the Democrat was finally able to be sworn in.

So you can see this effort from well before the election right up to Election Day and then even after the election to do anything you can to win the seats at all costs.

This is a great question because they have stripped a lot of his power.

Until this year, the State Board of Elections was under the control of the governor.

They moved that power from the governor to the state auditor, who is a newly elected Republican official.

Also, in North Carolina, election maps, redistricting is entirely under control of the legislature, and the governor has no role.

So that's also allowed them to go around the governor.