‘He and His Fellow Scaremongers Have Disrespected Democracy’
Pat McCrory has clearly lost the election but the soon-to-be unemployed one-term North Carolina Republican governor, three weeks after Election Day, refuses to concede. McCrory, teaming up with GOP lawmakers, has tried every trick in the book to pull out a win, by challenging ballots, trying to get large groups of votes declared invalid, and none of it has worked. While the election has been close, McCrory is losing by just under 10,000 votes.
On Monday the Republican controlled board of elections quashed what little hope McCrory had left.
On Tuesday the Editorial Board of The Charlotte Observer, the state’s largest paper, slammed the North Carolina governor.
“McCrory will be remembered for this lack of grace,” the paper’s editors write. “He and his fellow scaremongers have disrespected democracy and honest election workers of both parties while slandering innocent North Carolina citizens by recklessly accusing them of felonies. In doing so, he has further tarnished his already-stained legacy,” the paper says.
And the editors, all too aware of the North Carolina Republicans’ voting law that was recently struck down as unconstitutional because it targeted African American voters, disenfranchising them “with surgical precision,” surmise what’s next.
“His behavior is so incomprehensible – he fights in the face of virtually certain defeat – that it suggests there is an alternative goal. Like President-elect Donald Trump’s, McCrory’s creation of phantom election cheats tills the ground for future voter suppression efforts. Flimsy though the allegations are, they are all legislative leaders would need in their efforts to justify politically motivated restrictions.”Â
And they once again smack down McCrory, writing that “he doesn’t have a right to … is malign innocent voters with claims that he either knows are mirages or doesn’t care enough to vet.”
McCrory, of course, lost the election thanks to his zealous support of that anti-LGBT and likely unconstitutional law he signed, HB2.