Nothing should be shocking after Jan. 6, 2021, when an American president’s scheming to overturn the legitimate results of a fair election culminated in the bloody breaching of the Capitol. Still, I’m aghast at the audacity of what Republicans here in North Carolina are up to.

They are following in their leader’s footsteps and trying to steal an election. And if such an effort no longer seems as strange and sinister as it did before Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene and took a torch to whatever scruples still existed, that’s all the more reason to examine it closely. We need to be clear about where things stand. With an election denier about to move back into the White House and his disciples emboldened, our democracy is in danger. That’s the moral of the North Carolina story. It’s much, much bigger than this state.

The details: On Nov. 5, a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court was up for grabs, and the first official vote count showed that Allison Riggs, one of two Democrats among the court’s seven justices, had won re-election by a slim margin. Her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, demanded recounts. All in all, three separate counts gave Riggs a victory by slightly over 700 votes.

Which, in a properly functioning democracy with candidates and elected officials who put civic order and basic decency above their rapacity for power, would be the end of it. Hah. Griffin won’t concede. He continues to contest the result, which is being litigated simultaneously in state and federal courts. There won’t be any resolution for weeks.

The nature of his complaint is especially insidious. Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party, which supports him, aren’t producing evidence of voter fraud or a botched count. They’re disputing the legitimacy of more than 60,000 ballots, principally because the registration forms of many of the voters who cast them lack either a driver’s license or Social Security number, as law requires.

But that doesn’t mean the voters did anything wrong. Some of them may have registered before that information became mandatory in 2004. Long after that point, North Carolina routinely accepted registration forms without it. It’s also possible that voters provided it but that it’s not present in the state database because of administrative error or faulty record keeping.