It’s a busy time for the courts tasked with settling legislative disputes.
The three-judge panel that will preside over the two lawsuits filed by Gov. Roy Cooper and the North Carolina NAACP and Clean Air Carolina challenging constitutional amendment ballot language set a hearing at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 15. The hearing will be open to the public in courtroom 10C at the Wake County Courthouse.
The hearing will be just three weeks before ballots are set to go out by mail for absentee voting.
Meanwhile, there is another hearing set at 10 a.m. Monday with Judge Rebecca Holt for a preliminary injunction over a retroactive change in judicial filing rules. She issued a temporary restraining order to stop the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement from printing and certifying ballots until the case was settled.
State Supreme Court candidate Chris Anglin, who is one of two judicial candidates who sued over the change in rules, announced late Wednesday that if he did not prevail in court, he would withdraw from the race. He is challenging incumbent Republican Justice Barbara Jackson and Democratic candidate Anita Earls.
Anglin registered as a Republican to vie for the seat on the high court but the Party insists he is not a true member. GOP lawmakers called a special session to change the rules so that his party affiliation would not appear on the ballot.
It’s that possibility Anglin pointed to as the reason for his “conditional withdrawal.”
“While I firmly believe and intend to prove in court the Legislature’s action is an unconstitutional violation of my rights, in the unlikely circumstance that the courts allow it to go into effect, I will not allow my party designation to be misrepresented on the ballot and aid their efforts to rig this election,” he wrote in a statement. “Thus, I have informed the State Board of elections of my conditional withdrawal if I am not listed on the ballot as I intended when I filed.”
See the official notice below.
2018 08 08_Anglin Candidate Withdrawal by NC Policy Watch on Scribd
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