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In November, Allison Riggs (D) won election to the North Carolina Supreme Court. The race was extremely close. The initial count had Riggs ahead of her opponent Jefferson Griffin (R) by 623 votes out of the 5.5 million votes cast. Because of the small margin, Griffin requested a machine recount of all ballots cast, which put Riggs ahead with a lead of 734 votes. Griffin then requested a second partial hand recount, which saw Riggs’ lead increase by another 14 votes.
But even after multiple recounts, Griffin still refused to concede. Republicans have now spent over five months attempting to overthrow the election, claiming that Riggs only won because of votes cast by ineligible voters. President Donald Trump did not contest the 2024 election because he won. But Republicans have adopted Trump’s playbook of attributing any loss to election fraud.
Since the recounts, Griffin has been attempting to get over 60,000 ballots thrown out, claiming that many of them are invalid. Most of the challenges are to ballots cast by voters whose registration form did not include a driver’s license or Social Security number. Griffin is also challenging the eligibility of military voters and voters who live overseas.
Griffin originally filed legal challenges against the 60,000 ballots with the State Board of Elections. The Board, which has a Democratic majority, rejected Griffin’s claims. In February, a trial court also rejected Griffin’s case. Griffin then appealed the ruling. On Friday, a panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in Griffin’s favor, deciding that the 60,000 ballots must be recounted and verified.
The ruling states that all 60,000 people must be notified and given 15 business days to provide proof of identity, or their vote will be thrown out. The court also ruled to throw out ballots cast by North Carolina voters abroad who have never lived in the state, despite a state law passed in 2011 that gives them the right to vote. These voters often include children of military members stationed abroad or missionaries, the New York Times reported.
Griffin is attempting to disenfranchise tens of thousands of people without showing that any of these voters are ineligible. “[T]he Court of Appeals’ ruling is destined to disenfranchise thousands of North Carolinians, denying them due process and equal protection under North Carolina law,” Riggs’ lawyers wrote in a filing seeking a stay in the decision.
The case will now be appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, where Riggs should already be months into her first full term. Without Riggs, who will recuse herself, Republicans hold a 5-1 majority on the court. On Monday, the state Supreme Court temporarily stayed the Court of Appeals’ ruling to consider Riggs' appeal.
Changing the rules after the game is over
There are several legal issues with Griffin’s argument. One major problem is that if Republicans thought the registration process was legally flawed, it should have been challenged before the election.
Before the November election, a similar effort to remove voters’ eligibility was rejected by a federal judge appointed by Trump. Nevertheless, Griffin is recycling the same arguments after the election in an attempt to overturn the results.
This violates a federal election doctrine known as the Purcell principle, which states that courts should not alter the rules of the election directly before, during, or after an election. Court of Appeals Judge Toby Hampson (D) quoted Purcell v. Gonzalez in his dissent Friday. “The Purcell principle and other equitable principles demand we do not change the rules of an election midstream or after votes are tallied to disenfranchise qualified North Carolina voters,” Hampson wrote.
Sending voters a QR code before disenfranchising them
Another issue is that the voters Griffin is attempting to disenfranchise were not properly notified about how their ballots were being challenged. Instead, voters received a postcard from the North Carolina Republican Party instructing them to scan a QR code for additional information.
Popular Information obtained a photo of one postcard.
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Hampson wrote in his dissent that it is not certain that these postcards successfully notified the affected voters. “The postcards do not identify a protestor or campaign committee, do not provide for forwarding, and, ultimately, provide no indication a quasi-judicial election protest has, in fact, been instituted involving the recipient,” Hampson wrote. “Forcing voters to have the technological means, ability, or trust to not only scan a QR code—sent anonymously through the mail—but to then be directed to a partisan website in order to sift through dozens of challenges and thousands of names, which were not even listed in alphabetical order, cannot be said to be reasonably calculated or certain to inform those affected voters.”
Disenfranchising eligible voters
Most of the votes Griffin is challenging are being called into question because the voter registration does not include a driver's license or Social Security number, which has been included on North Carolina voter registrations since 2002. But, as the dissenting opinion issued by the North Carolina appeals court points out, a voter registration lacking a driver's license or Social Security number does not mean that the voter did not provide one.
In North Carolina, if a county elections board cannot validate a driver’s license or Social Security number — which can occur if a clerk enters the number incorrectly, or if there is a discrepancy between maiden and married last names or hyphenated last names — then the number provided by the voter will not be saved as a part of the voter registration.
None of the voters were told there was anything missing from their voter registration form. They received confirmation that they were registered to vote and were provided a ballot. Further, Hampson pointed out several cases where North Carolina courts had previously ruled that ensuring complete and accurate voter registration was the responsibility of county election boards and that voters could not be disenfranchised due to errors by the board.
Riggs has also argued that throwing out ballots solely because of a missing driver’s license or Social Security number is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that public officials cannot “deny the right of any individual to vote in any election because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election.”
Throwing out military votes
Griffin is making another argument that military and overseas voters who did not provide photo identification should have their votes thrown out. According to Griffin, ballots cast by overseas voters are subject to the state's laws on other kinds of absentee ballots, requiring photo identification. But overseas ballots are subject to a different provision of North Carolina law that does not require a photo ID.
Since 2023, the State Elections Board, which is given authority by North Carolina law to provide instructions to overseas voters on how to cast their ballots, has implemented a rule that overseas voters would not need to provide photo identification. Before this election, Griffin did not take issue with this rule.
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How to steal a state supreme court seat with one weird trickNorth Carolina Republicans are closing in on a brazen heist.
It only took five months, multiple lawsuits, and an assist from his Republican pals on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, but it looks like Jefferson Griffin has successfully managed to steal a state supreme court seat from Justice Allison Riggs. Griffin, a hard-right judge currently on the state court of appeals — yes, the very court that just handed him a victory — got 65,000 legally cast votes thrown out last week. One of the judges in the 2-1 majority ruling also ran a joint GOP election campaign with Griffin and other court of appeals candidates. Being buddies with Griffin didn’t seem to strike that judge, Fred Gore, as anything that would have warranted recusal because GOP judges no longer care about anything as trivial as conflicts of interest. Those 65,000 voters now have only 15 days to confirm their voting eligibility. If they don’t, their votes no longer count. But this isn’t just a victory for Griffin. It’s also a victory for conservatives who, mimicking Donald Trump’s spurious challenges to Joe Biden’s 2020 win, no longer acknowledge or respect election outcomes if they lose. The stealLet’s get this out of the way: there is no dispute whatsoever that Riggs beat Griffin in the election for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Period. Riggs’s victory was narrow — only 734 votes — but that victory was confirmed by two recounts. So Griffin had to take another approach, best described as “if you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em.” Griffin’s legal theory behind getting tens of thousands of votes invalidated is equal parts complicated and ridiculous. His argument is that those 65,000 people were never eligible to vote. North Carolina law requires voters to provide driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their social security number when registering. Per Griffin, any voter registration form missing that information means that person was ineligible to vote. For many of those voters, they did supply that information when registering, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t properly entered into the state’s database.
More importantly, even if that information was missing because the voter never supplied it, the state had already determined those people were eligible to cast votes. The majority’s decision reaches back in time to overrule the state’s determination and then punish voters for the error. Of course, these voters did not know there was any issue with their registration because they were allowed to vote! The majority opinion is steeped in the language of right-wing voter suppression, saying “the inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively ‘disenfranchises’ lawful voters.” So one unlawful ballot disenfranchises voters, but throwing out tens of thousands of votes does not. Got it. The court of appeals decision also ignored the biggest thing undermining Griffin’s theory: after years of trying, conservatives finally got a photo ID requirement passed. So, those 65,000 voters? Most of them showed an approved form of photographic identification when they cast their vote. There’s no way to argue that those people cast fraudulent ballots, given they had to prove their identity at the polls. Instead of acknowledging that inconvenient truth, the majority fixates on voters who aren’t required to provide the same sort of photo ID — military and overseas voters. The North Carolina General Assembly adopted different procedures for military and overseas voters and did not apply the photo ID requirement to them. As Court of Appeals Judge Toby Hampson’s dissent explains, both the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voters Act and the Uniform Military and Overseas Voter Act have model procedures intended to be adopted in all states so that those voters aren’t subject to a patchwork, shifting set of requirements. The court of appeals decision essentially rewrites the law, imposing the photo ID requirement on those voters without any legislation to that effect. So, all those voters who followed existing North Carolina law are now punished for not following the law the court just invented. It’s especially galling that Griffin’s post-election challenges are similar to pre-election ones where the GOP did not prevail. Republicans tried to disenfranchise the same overseas voters Griffin now challenges. They also tried to remove 225,000 registered voters from the voter rolls because their registration form lacked a driver’s license or the last four digits of a social security number. Those challenges were rejected in part because the GOP brought them too close to the election. But apparently it’s perfectly fine to bring them afterward.
If either Griffin or his friends on the court of appeals were genuinely concerned about the legality of those 65,000 votes, the ballots should be thrown out entirely. Instead, Griffin has challenged them regarding his race against Riggs. That’s part of what makes Griffin’s efforts, and the court rewarding those efforts, so egregious and cynical. If the argument is that these voters were not eligible to vote and the majority’s ostensible concern for the sanctity of the ballot box is so great that they’re banging on about the perils of “even one unlawful ballot,” it’s unclear why that wouldn’t apply to all other races. Even if the theory here is that those 65,000 votes weren’t enough to swing any other statewide election result or even a congressional district, what of state-level races? State House and Senate districts are small, and a few thousand allegedly ineligible votes could possibly flip them. But everyone knows that would be an absolute nightmare to address. It would require adjustments to dozens of races, a complicated cascade of changes that may or may not invalidate other election results. |
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