March 26, 2026 marked the date that ended 13 years of Democrat delay tactics over North Carolina’s weakest-in-the-nation voter ID law, as it was finally blessed by an activist Federal District Court Judge, named Loretta Biggs, who complained of being “constrained” by controlling Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit case law as she grudgingly ruled for the people of NC.
Since 2011, my merry band of patriots had been pushing for voter ID through an organization I founded with a retired quality control engineer named John Pizzo. We called our group Voter Integrity Project, because we both saw election fraud as a major threat to the nation, while Republican officials were ignoring it.
Our first order of business was to advocate in support of voter ID. The Left had already organized some well-funded protest against the proposed legislation, so we decided to launch our own rally in May of 2011, showing popular support for the bill called Restore Confidence in Government or HB 351 and things went well! Besides the media attention it garnered, we also attracted volunteers!
That particular voter ID bill came because of 2010’s Tea Party Wave election. It allowed Republicans to control both chambers of NC’s legislature for the first time in 112 years, but the GOP still lacked enough votes to override our Democrat Governor, Beverly “Dumpling1” Perdue. No Democrats sided with common sense and the bill ultimately died by a haughty veto from Perdue.
By 2012, the Republican establishment hijacked the populist wave, but still managed to earn veto-proof majorities for both the House and the Senate. Listening to their voters, the legislature introduced HB 589. This was their first serious attempt to reform 114 years of election laws that had been systematically rigged by the party of the KKK and Jim Crow.
When the bill passed, in 2013, it immediately triggered a lawfare strategy against the Legislature that featured lawsuits in both state and federal court. The state lawsuit was more of a sideshow to the main event federal case. The original Plaintiffs, the NAACP, were soon joined by Eric Holder’s DOJ and this would be an epic battle.
Many on our side were stunned and demoralized by the lawsuit; but we were gleeful, because we knew the Jenga block that would bring down their entire case. In order to win, the Left’s argument hinged on denying voter fraud exists and we were eager to expose their lie.
As soon as the legal team was set up, John Pizzo, Mark Merry, Wonder Woman2, and myself all approached the Legislature’s legal team, showing them video clips like this one and offering to help them make the Plaintiffs explain why such reports are untrue. In short, our proposed strategy was to “put voter fraud on trial” by bringing some of our better eyewitnesses3 into the courtroom.
One of the Republican attorneys, the late Tom Farr, seemed open to the idea, but he called me back a few days later, dejectedly explaining how they were going in a different direction. He never offered a reason for the decision, but we suspected it had a lot to do with (then) Speaker of the House Thom Tillis’ blunder on national television, declaring that voter ID wasn’t because of fraud.
That mindset put the Legislature’s lawyers in a bad spot. Instead of making the other side defend their completely unprovable claim that “voter impersonation fraud is rare,” Phil Strach and Tom Farr were being forced to concede the fraud denial and make their bones by using the “we’re-not-racist” gambit.
This defense allowed them to point out all of the nifty loopholes Team Tillis had woven into the law that would somehow prove they’re not racists. Like all of America’s “gun control” laws, the loopholes in our voter ID law provide fully scalable tactics for an organized and funded enterprise to steal tens of thousands of votes.
But Tillis was openly plotting his 2014 US Senate coronation and he didn’t need a bill that would attack voter fraud. He just need one that would slide through the Obama DOJ and fool honest people into believing the problem was solved. With no idea of the loopholes, such low-information Republican voters would pull out their NC Driver’s License when voting and tell themselves that the Legislature had fixed the voter fraud problem.
We hated the law and attacked it relentlessly. The bill had it’s flaws; but in the end, we had no choice and conceded their point that a weak and porous law was better than no voter ID law.
In April of 2016, US District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder upheld the Legislature’s omnibus reform, HB 589. In addition to voter ID, that law mitigated a panoply of fraud-friendly provisions woven into our elections statute. It repealed things like Same-Day Registration and pre-registration of 16-year-old children, while reducing the early voting period from 17 days to ten days.4
The plaintiffs’ appeal was certain to go nowhere, since the US Supreme Court held a 5-4 balance of sane judges. This “win” made Strach and Farr into the heroes of the day. But then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had the audacity to die and this tied the score at SCOTUS. Until a replacement could be appointed by Mitch McConnell’s Senate, the Supremes wouldn’t be able to get five Justices to accept the case.
Thus, the Obama-packed Fourth Federal District Court knew they could ignore the Schroeder ruling and take license to do anything they wanted. In the end, they called the NC Legislature a bunch of racists and killed the badly needed reforms. That was when Federal Appellate Judge James Andrew Wynn penned the hypnotic incantation about “surgical precision.”
PBS reported at the time, while memorializing Wynn’s poetic phrase…
The state offered little justification for the law, the court said. Those who defended the law said they were doing so to prevent voter fraud. “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist,” the court said.
Not to spike the ball or anything, but I have to point out that Wynn’s vacuous ruling could declare voter fraud was a “problem that did not exist” for one critical reason: The smartest Republican attorneys in NC never bothered to challenge the infantile claim.
But back to Wynn’s laughable opus, he even included a footnote5 about an embarrassing video which first aired on John Oliver’s Daily Show. The segment starred Don Yelton, an Asheville area Republican Precinct Chair. They followed him around, filming him for five hours, until he lost control of his mouth. When Don cracked under the pressure, he started making racists remarks and THAT was what Oliver’s crew was waiting for!
Magically, Judge Wynn used Yelton’s worst utterances to channel the minds of the entire NC Legislature and conclude they had racist intent when they enacted the badly needed legislation. On July 29, 2016, just three months after Schroeder issued his District Court ruling, Wynn led a three-judge appellate panel in killing the law.6
The overriding principle of that era was a legal theory, called “disparate impact” that didn’t require actual proof of discrimination. Instead, all it took was for some academic type to concoct a peer-reviewed journal article claiming some minority group would have a harder time voting because of a ID law.
In his extremely detailed 479-page ruling, Judge Schroeder patiently showed how none of the Plaintiff’s claims were supported by the evidence they brought forth. In other words, the Left could only prove discrimination in the abstract, but not in the real world. Despite initial claims that 300,000 NC voters would not be able to vote, none of their 32 lawyers could manage to produce a single voter who was unable to vote because of HB 589. Not one victim.7
But hey. Remember those loopholes? The whole reason the Legislature inserted them was to disarm the Left’s charges of racism. In that sense, the Strach-Farr strategy worked! At least they convinced Schroeder that our lawmakers weren’t a bunch of racists. If adults had gotten the case in the Fourth District or if Scalia’s death hadn’t upset the balance of SCOTUS, Shcroeder’s ruling would have held and NC would now be enjoying our second decade of elections with a voter ID law in force.
But none of that happen and here we are again in 2026, finally affirming a 13-year-old law. Thanks to the Judges Trump appointed in his first term and competency at the DOJ, those old dirty racist accusations no longer enjoyed the same superpower they once had.
Thus, a resentful Judge Biggs ruled from on-high, using the word, “compelled” four times in her opinion, as in “compelled by case law.” Specifically, she was grousing about Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which among other things8, required plaintiffs to accept the laws passed by Legislatures “in good faith.” In order to win, plaintiffs pretty much have to prove the discrimination was more than just theoretical. Bad news for Biggs and Wynn, mind reading was no longer justification for rewriting the law. They’ve both now retired.
Waning are the days when Leftists can shut down rational debates simply by accusing their opponents of having racist intent. That tactic is designed to sidetrack conservatives. Instead, of defending their ideas, this tactic tricks conservatives into defending their legitimacy as human beings made in God’s image. In geek terms, the Left dismisses your logos or logic with an ethos attack, charging their opponent with any sort of an irrefutable thought crime.
Face it. It’s humanly impossible to prove a particular thought is NOT in their head, but imagine the Orwellian inquisition.
O’Brian: “Was the idea ever in your head?”
Winston Smith: “Never…?”
O’Brian: “Suppose I lock you in a room with half a dozen UNC Women’s Studies majors… until you tell me the truth?”
Cruelty aside, not only are such accusations unethical in civil society, they also short circuit the debate America desperately needs in order to pass any good laws. Beyond the morality, this tactic greatly enriched America’s Civil Rights mafia for nearly 70 years. Such blackmail even helped one saintly group amass over $700 million through something akin to racial-racketeering.
Though recently passed away, the Plaintiff in the Brnovich Decision, Arizona’s former Attorney General, Mark Brnovich merits most of credit for North Carolina getting any sort of voter ID law on the books.
Meanwhile, as if Biggs were begging forgiveness from her Obama-worshiping friends, she grumbled, “plaintiffs have presented significant evidence of the disparate impact that S.B. 824 has inflicted and continues to inflict on minority voters in North Carolina (p. 108).”
Thanks to the late Mark Brnovich… that dog don’t hunt.
~ jd
Multiple news reports from her 2008 campaign era, said “Dumpling” or “Dumplin” was an informal, behind-the-scenes one used by the “good ol’ boys” in the Senate, but a 1994 Virginian-Pilot article (July 16, 1994) said “Senate leader Marc Basnight publicly called her ‘dumpling’ while presiding over the chamber. He later confirmed it was his personal nickname for her and said he knew it wouldn’t offend her. Perdue herself stated she was not offended. Basnight was the most powerful political figure in North Carolina at the time.
That Wonder Woman was a talented early supporter, who came to us from the IT field. Later, she decided to go make money and left politics, During her return to the industry dominated by the Left, she asked that we remove her name from our website.
Since no video is allowed in the voting enclosure, the only evidence of fraud in-progress is the eyewitness. Stay tuned to this Substack for a future project revealing some of the most credible witnesses we found in this process.
This story would get even longer if I explained why each of those provisions were badly needed, but feel free to address any of them in the comments and I’ll be try to answer!
I writing more details of the gap years between Wynn’s ruling and Biggs’ decision last week, but it got so long that I decided to punt this sage to a future Substack post. When completed, I’ll link to it here.
Finding a victim has historically been the Left’s Achilles Heel in killing voter ID laws. In 2008, their inability to produce an actual disenfranchised voter, led to a 6-3 SCOTUS decision in a combined appeal of voter ID laws enacted in both Georgia and Indiana. As Hans von Spakovsky later noted, the League of Women Voters embarrassed themselves with their designated witness in the case. She was turned away from the polls in Indiana after presenting a Florida driver’s license. Like the infamous Margo Dupre, the woman had also applied for a Homestead Exemption in Florida, meaning she had declared herself a Florida resident. Justice Stevens, a flaming Liberal, wrote the opinion in the case. Why? Because he rejected the Plaintiff’s denials of voter fraud. He was from Chicago!
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