How To Steal An Election

That's a pretty bold claim in the blog post title, but that's the only possible conclusion at this point back home in North Carolina as even with a 8,000 vote lead in the governor's race, Democratic candidate and NC Attorney General Roy Cooper still has not gotten a concession from NC GOP Governor Pat McCrory.

Democrats and Republicans in this fiercely contested political battleground have regularly resorted to creative legal maneuvers and election-law changes in their efforts to wring every last vote from the state’s nearly seven million voters. But even by that standard, the disputed, hairbreadth race for governor is plowing litigious and acrimonious ground.

Scrambling to save the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, Republicans said they were pursuing protests in about half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, alleging that fraud and technical troubles had pushed the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Roy Cooper, to a statewide lead of more than 6,500 votes. But Republican-controlled county elections boards, including one here in vote-rich Durham County, turned back some of the challenges on Friday.

The legal and political jockeying raised the specter of a recount, and it could ultimately climax in a political wild card: Mr. McCrory using a state law to contest the election in the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly.

“We’re supposed to have an inauguration on Jan. 7,” Theresa Kostrzewa, a Republican lobbyist, said Friday. “Are we going to have a governor? That, I think, is what most people are going to start wondering pretty soon.”

The governor’s race this year was among the most bitterly contested campaigns in the country. The state was a prime battleground in the presidential election, and it has been fractured by debates about voting, transgender rights, Medicaid and abortion. Republicans largely prevailed here on Election Day: Donald J. Trump won North Carolina by more than three percentage points, and Senator Richard Burr was re-elected by a larger margin — but Mr. McCrory struggled.

The contest’s aftermath has become a protracted spectacle. Mr. McCrory’s campaign said this week that there were “known instances of votes being cast by dead people, felons or individuals who voted more than once.” A spokesman for Mr. Cooper, Ford Porter, replied that the governor had “set a new standard for desperation.”

Understand that Pat McCrory is openly saying the election results in his state, with many of the counties controlled by Republican-led election boards, are fraudulent.  And there is a method to that madness: state law may allow McCrory to steal the election by giving it to the Republican-dominated state legislature to determine.

Under state law, the legislature could order a new election or, “if it can determine which candidate received the highest number of votes,” it may declare a winner. The law asserts that the legislature’s decision in such a contest is “not reviewable” by the courts.

Mr. Diaz said talk about legislative involvement “seems to be media-driven speculation, but we’re not going to discuss possible future steps that the campaign may or may not take.”

He added, “We are extremely concerned about the voter fraud revelations that are emerging across the state and intend to ensure that every vote is counted and counted properly.”

A lawyer for Mr. Cooper, Marc E. Elias, who also played down the possibility that the General Assembly might decide the election’s outcome, said Republican challenges were “calculated at nothing other than needless delay.”

“There is nothing,” he added, “that Gov. McCrory or his legal team are going to be able to do to undo what is just basic math.”

Believe me when I say this is McCrory's plan.  He knows he has a lot of power here as Governor, and with the General Assembly in his pocket, he knows that if he can stall here long enough legally that the NC House will have to step in for "the good of the state".  That's why McCrory is saying the election is fraudulent and that the contest will have to be determined by Republicans in the Assembly, because there "won't be a way to know" otherwise who truly won...and the Assembly decision is final by law.

The mechanism for theft of an election is in place.  And Pat McCrory is going to try to use it.