'Damage is done': Expert warns Republican's bitter fight against loss now GOP's go-to move

Losing candidates could follow a playbook laid out by a defeated Republican North Carolina state supreme court hopeful who aggressively challenged his election loss for months.

Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes in November, but he waged a protracted fight to toss out 65,000 ballots cast by voters that his attorneys argued had not sufficiently proven their eligibility.The Guardian reported that future candidates could succeed in effectively changing election rules after the fact.

“The damage to future North Carolina elections has already been done,” said Bryan Anderson, a North Carolina reporter who authors the Substack newsletter Anderson Alerts. "[Judges] have issued decisions paving the way for retroactive voter challenges. It’s a view that can’t be put back in a box and stands to create little incentive for candidates to concede defeat in close elections going forward.”

“There’s now also precedent for wrongly challenging voters who followed all rules in place at the time of an election and leaving them without any means to address concerns with their ballots,” Anderson added.

Republicans have taken control of the state elections board from Democrats, and President Donald Trump has created an atmosphere where Republicans believe they're justified in overturning election results that don't go their way.

“[Griffin's challenge] only failed because the federal courts that oversee North Carolina happen to be free of partisan corruption," wrote legal reporter Mark Stern. “But what if a Republican candidate loses by a hair in, say, Texas, where state and federal courts are badly tainted by GOP bias. Griffin has laid out the blueprint for an election heist in such a scenario, with SCOTUS standing as the lone bulwark against an assault on democracy.”

The playbook has been established, but at least one expect believes future challenges are similarly doomed to failure.

“Certainly it is a shame that it took six months to get here, but the end result here is a reaffirmation of the fact that the federal courts aren’t going to stand for changing the rules for an election after it’s been run,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Will other people try this? Maybe. But I think the lesson that should be learned from this is actually this won’t work.”