RALEIGH, N.C. — Three weeks after Election Day, the North Carolina governor’s race remains an unresolved, hotly contested muddle. The Democratic challenger, Roy Cooper, has declared victory. But the Republican incumbent, Pat McCrory, trailing by thousands of votes in the as-yet-unfinished tally, has refused to concede, as he and his allies charge that the election was marred by numerous irregularities.

Mr. McCrory’s foes are furious. Last week, they parked a U-Haul truck in front of the governor’s mansion and waved moving boxes adorned with the face of Ray Charles as they sang, “Hit the Road, Pat.” On Monday evening, hundreds gathered at the state Capitol, shouting, “No stealing our election!”

The North Carolina imbroglio is so complicated, with so many moving pieces, that a spokesman for the State Board of Elections could not say Tuesday when it might be resolved. It comes amid four years of pitched ideological battles in a state sharply split between Democrats and Republicans.

But it also comes amid a broader wave of skepticism about the integrity of the basic mechanics of the American electoral process, including the recount of the presidential results in three states sought by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The move enraged President-elect Donald J. Trump, who this week said on Twitter that “millions” of people had illegally voted for Hillary Clinton, a widely derided claim for which he offered no evidence. </s> WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - A three-judge federal panel ordered congressional districts in North Carolina to be redrawn ahead of the 2018 elections, ruling on Tuesday that the current Republican-drawn map was illegal and unconstitutionally partisan.

The judges said the state legislator responsible for the 2016 map had said he drew it to give Republican candidates an advantage.

“But that is not a choice the Constitution allows legislative map drawers to make,” the court said.

Ralph Hise, North Carolina’s state Senate Redistricting Chairman, said through a spokeswoman that lawmakers would appeal.

Democrats and the groups that brought the suit applauded the ruling.

“Today’s ruling is a major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans’ unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement.

While prior court decisions had ruled against unconstitutional racial gerrymandering in North Carolina, Common Cause - one of the public-interest groups that filed the lawsuit - said the ruling marked the first time a court had struck down partisan gerrymandering in the state.

The U.S. Supreme Court last June upheld a lower court’s ruling that Republican lawmakers in North Carolina had mapped state legislative districts in a way that diluted the clout of black voters.

The judges gave the state until Jan. 29 to file a proposed remedial plan with the court. </s> North Carolina voter ID rules are posted at the door of a voting station at the Alamance Fire Station in Greensboro, N.C., on March 15, 2016.

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal to reinstate North Carolina's voter identification law that a lower court said targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

The justices on Monday left in place the lower court ruling striking down the law's photo ID requirement and reduction in early voting.

The situation was complicated when Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Atty. Gen. Josh Stein tried to withdraw the appeal, which was first filed when Republican Pat McCrory was governor.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the political situation created uncertainty over who is authorized to seek review of the lower-court ruling.

The dispute is similar to the court fight over Texas' voter ID law, also struck down as racially discriminatory. </s> If Cooper can maintain this lead McCrory will not be able to ask for a recount

RALEIGH, N.C. — Gov. Pat McCrory is trailing Attorney General Roy Cooper in the gubernatorial race by over 10,000 votes, the threshold for a recount, according to the State Board of Elections website. This is the first time Cooper’s lead has grown to that benchmark, and nearly all of the counties are finished with their counting.

McCory has been battling for his political life, demanding recounts and claiming voter fraud in a tight race.

McCrory officially filed for a recount to avoid missing a deadline, but if Cooper can maintain this lead there will be no recount. ABC 11 reports that there are four counties still out.

The State Board of Elections is scheduled to hear the appeal of a Republican attorney requesting that more than 90,000 Durham County votes be recounted by hand because of alleged irregularities. The Durham board has already dismissed his request, citing that there is no evidence the ballots were tallied incorrectly.

The election largely became a referendum on HB2, the anti-LGBTQ law McCrory signed, which cost the state millions of dollars in lost revenue and thousands of jobs. Cooper opposed the bill.

About the author: Jeff Taylor is a journalist, artist and social media editor. In addition to QNotes, his work has appeared in publications such The Charlotte Observer, Creative Loafing Charlotte, Inside Lacrosse, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He graduated from the State University of New York at Brockport and has lived in Charlotte since 2006. Follow him on Twitter @jefftaylorhuman. </s> A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina Republicans relied too heavily on race when they drew two bizarrely shaped congressional voting districts that were used until the 2014 election. The ruling upholds a lower court decision that ordered a new map for the 2016 election. Even with the new lines, Republicans maintained their hold ... </s> N.C. Gerrymandered Map Ruled Unconstitutional By Panel Of Judges

A three-judge panel ruled late Tuesday that North Carolina's congressional district map was illegally gerrymandered because of excessive partisanship that gave Republicans a solid advantage for most of the seats.

In a 191-page opinion, judges claimed that the map drawn by Republicans in North Carolina had been "motivated by invidious partisan intent" that would divide the state into 13 districts, of which 10 are Republican.

The federal judges have given state lawmakers until Jan. 29 to fix the issue and show them a new map.

The deadline is important because candidates for the November congressional elections begin filing for the primaries on Feb. 12.

The judges unanimously agreed that the state's lawmakers violated the equal-protection clause in the U.S. Constitution when the state's Republicans drew maps explicitly to favor their party.

The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., reports:

"The ruling comes in cases filed by the League of Women Voters and Common Cause in North Carolina stemming from maps adopted in 2016 during a special legislative session. It throws a new wrinkle and more uncertainty into the 2018 election cycle in North Carolina a month before candidates were scheduled to file for office.

"We're enormously gratified on behalf of our clients and all voters in North Carolina that no one will have to endure another congressional election under an unconstitutional map," said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represented some of the challengers. "The court was clear in demanding a real remedy before the 2018 elections, and we expect the General Assembly to respect that order."

Democrats applauded the ruling.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin called the ruling a "major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans' unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage."

Republicans, however, promise an appeal.

A spokeswoman for Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise, told the Raleigh newspaper that legislative leaders plan to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hise and state Rep. David Lewis have led redistricting efforts in the legislature.

According to attorney Allison Riggs, the ruling is the first time federal judges have struck down congressional districts as partisan gerrymanders. A Wisconsin case that was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court involved state legislative districts found to be partisan gerrymanders.

NPR's Nina Totenberg reported on the Wisconsin test case before the Supreme Court:

In 2011 Wisconsin Republicans completely controlled the redistricting process for the first time in four decades. A divided federal court later found that Republicans, using high-speed computer technology along with new voter data, were able to draw new district lines to solidify their control of the Legislature for at least the rest of the decade, if not longer. Indeed, a year after the redistricting, Republicans captured only a minority of the statewide vote — 48.6 percent — but, as they had privately predicted, they still won 60 of the 99 state legislative seats, while the Democrats, who had won a majority of the vote, captured a mere 39 seats.

As the clock ticks down on the North Carolina court order, a majority of the judges agreed that if the legislature won't alter the map, they would hire a redistricting expert to draw replacement boundaries. </s> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a Republican bid to revive a strict North Carolina voter-identification law that a lower court found deliberately discriminated against black voters, handing a victory to Democrats and civil rights groups.

FILE PHOTO: Citizens vote on a basketball court at a recreation center serving as polling place during the U.S. general election in Greenville, North Carolina, U.S. November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo

The justices’ decision not to take up a Republican appeal in the important voting rights dispute set no legal precedent and did not rule out the possibility that the court, with a 5-4 conservative majority, would endorse such laws in future. North Carolina’s law was one of a number of similar statutes passed by Republican-controlled states.

“Today’s announcement is good news for North Carolina voters. We need to be making it easier to vote, not harder,” said North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who took office in January and asked the court not to take up the case.

The justices left in place a July 2016 ruling by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that voided the law passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed by a Republican governor.

The appeals court found that the law’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” concluding that the Republican-led legislature enacted it “with discriminatory intent.”

Republicans have said laws like the one in North Carolina are needed to prevent voter fraud. Democrats have said such laws are voter suppression measures intended to make it harder for groups that tend to back Democratic candidates, including black and Hispanic voters, to cast ballots.

The North Carolina law required that certain forms of government-issued photo identification cards be presented by voters, for example allowing driver’s licenses, passports and military identification cards but not public assistance cards used disproportionately by minorities. Other provisions included cutting early voting days and ending same-day voter registration.

The Supreme Court could yet be asked to review a similar Texas law now under challenge in lower courts. In April, a federal judge ruled that the law was enacted with the intent to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a two-page statement indicating the move not to hear the North Carolina case should not be interpreted as saying anything about the merits of the statute. Roberts said one reason for rejecting the case was a “blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this court under North Carolina law.”

The court typically does not explain its reasoning behind rejecting a case.

‘STRONG MESSAGE’

Civil rights groups hailed Monday’s action.

“We are grateful that the Supreme Court has decided to allow the 4th Circuit’s ruling to stand, confirming that discrimination has no place in our democracy and elections. This ruling sends a strong message that lawmakers in North Carolina should stop enacting laws that discriminate based on race,” said Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, one of the groups that challenged the law.

Governor Cooper and North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Stein, had told the justices they wanted to drop the state’s appeal of the 4th Circuit ruling. But the Republican-led state legislature said it should be able to intervene to defend the law. The appeal was filed by Cooper’s predecessor, Republican Pat McCrory.

“In light of Chief Justice Roberts’ statement that the ruling was not based on the merits of voter ID, all North Carolinians can rest assured that Republican legislators will continue fighting to protect the integrity of our elections by implementing the commonsense requirement to show a photo ID when we vote,” North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger and House of Representatives Speaker Tim Moore, Republicans who backed the law, said in a joint statement.

Myrna Perez, a lawyer at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law that has challenged the Texas law, said the Supreme Court is likely to take up that case or a similar dispute from Wisconsin.

In the meantime, Republican state lawmakers remain eager to enact new voter restrictions. Four states — Iowa, Arkansas, North Dakota and Indiana — have passed such measures this year alone, according to the Brennan Center.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts speaks at the dedication of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, U.S., September 24, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo

Perez said “there is a bullishness from legislators” about imposing voter restrictions, with Republican President Donald Trump’s administration backing conservative allegations of widespread voter fraud and conservative Justice Neil Gorusch recently appointed by Trump to the court to restore its conservative majority.

Civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and individual voters sued to block North Carolina’s statute, saying it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law and provisions of a civil rights law called the Voting Rights Act.

North Carolina passed the law weeks after the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 to eliminate a requirement that states with a history of discrimination receive federal approval before changing election laws. </s> In a victory for voting rights advocates, the Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from North Carolina’s Republican leaders and let stand a decision that struck down their 2013 law that added new restrictions on voting.

The 4th Circuit Court had branded the law as racially biased and said North Carolina lawmakers had targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

North Carolina lawmakers took action immediately after the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote had voided part of the historic Voting Rights Act that required some states, including North Carolina, to get federal approval before altering their voting laws.

The new North Carolina measure made five changes, including restricting early voting, which had been used more often by African American voters, and by requiring registered voters to show one of several photo ID cards at the polls. The appeals court noted the state had chosen the types of photo IDs that were less likely to be held by African Americans.

Then Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, slammed the decision and lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court. Last year, four of the high court’s conservative justices had signaled they were prepared to block the lower court ruling and revive the law. They then lacked a fifth vote due to the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

But the situation changed in November when the state’s voters ousted McCrory and narrowly elected Democrat Roy Cooper. And he and the state’s attorney general, also a Democrat, recently told the high court they did not wish to appeal the lower court’s ruling.

At the same time, , the GOP-controlled legislature said it did wish to have the appeal heard.

After considering the issue for several weeks, the Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear the case.

“Given the blizzard of filings over who is and who is not authorized to seek review in this court under North Carolina law, it is important to recall our frequent admonition that the ‘denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.

The court’s action sets no legal precedent, but it likely ends the litigation over the North Carolina law.

Voting rights advocates hailed the demise of the North Carolina law.

“An ugly chapter in voter suppression is finally closing,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

“We are grateful that the Supreme Court has decided to allow the 4th Circuit’s ruling to stand, confirming that discrimination has no place in our democracy and elections,” said Allison Riggs, senior staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “This ruling sends a strong message that lawmakers in North Carolina should stop enacting laws that discriminate based on race.”

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Senate approval of Trump's trade chief could speed up NAFTA talks </s> (CNN) North Carolina voters cast ballots for their next governor three weeks ago. But still, somehow, a winner has yet to be declared and neither candidate has conceded.

Roy Cooper, the state's Democratic attorney general, has seen a narrow lead grow during that time. According to his campaign, he's now 10,000 votes ahead.

Meanwhile, Gov. Pat McCrory, the embattled Republican incumbent who faced fallout this year for supporting the state's controversial "bathroom bill, " has refused to concede the race because he wants a recount.

The reason, he's said, is voting irregularities that could change the final outcome of the race.

Recount in the Research Triangle

Indeed, McCrory won a small victory Wednesday -- keeping his fading hopes for re-election alive -- when the Republican-controlled North Carolina State Board of Elections Wednesday ordered a machine recount of more than 90,000 ballots in Durham County. The majority of those voters in a deep-blue county, located in the heart of the Research Triangle, had cast ballots for Cooper.

JUST WATCHED A political scientist on North Carolina's demographics Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH A political scientist on North Carolina's demographics 01:14

"What harm would it do to scan these votes and count them so no that one campaign is going to think why wouldn't they count those votes?" election board member James Baker, a Republican, asked at the hearing.

Russell Peck, campaign manager for McCrory, said in a statement that the governor is pleased that the election board has granted the request.

"We will respect whatever the results show," Peck said. "We ask that this is done immediately."

Trey Nix, Cooper's campaign manager, seemed unfazed by the recount's approval. Responding to the board's decision, Nix said Cooper remained "confident" that the end results will continue to be in favor of Cooper.

JUST WATCHED Could NC legislature decide NC governor's race? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Could NC legislature decide NC governor's race? 03:43

"It is wrong that Governor McCrory continues to waste taxpayer money with false accusations and attempts to delay and that the Republican controlled Board of Elections did not follow the law," Nix said in a statement. "However, Roy Cooper's lead has grown to over 10,000 votes and after a partial recount of 6 precincts in one county, the outcome of the election will be the same."

When will North Carolina know?

If Cooper does in fact have a 10,000-vote lead, McCrory would not benefit from a mandatory statewide recount, which his campaign had hoped for in recent weeks. CNN affiliate WTVD reports that 94 of the state's 100 counties have finished counting ballots.

"It's time to accept the will of the people," North Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Patsy Keever told WTVD.
Recounts begin in North Carolina.