A three-judge panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals heard oral arguments Friday in the contentious legal battle surrounding the state's Supreme Court election — the only uncertified race in the country. Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate who trails by just 734 votes, is seeking to have some 65,000 votes he claims are invalid thrown out from the November contest.
The panel, comprised of two Republicans and one Democrat, peppered counsel for Griffin, the state Board of Elections and Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs for around 90 minutes. They asked the attorneys to square competing legal precedents with election law principles barring last-minute changes before an election and questioned who, if anyone, bears the burden of the election challenges.
"Petitioner in this case is only challenging certain votes in certain counties," Judge Toby Hampson, a Democrat, told Griffin's lawyer Craig Schauer, noting that in-person votes have not been challenged. "How does it not impose a significant burden on voters all across North Carolina, where we're only selectively looking at certain ballots?"
In an appeal, Griffin asked the panel to overturn a lower court's ruling that the North Carolina Board of Elections correctly denied his election challenges, order the board to discount the votes and send the case back for a fact-finding hearing. He claims that more than 65,000 votes are invalid because the votes were cast by voters who did not provide or were not asked to provide their driver's license or Social Security numbers on their registrations; overseas voters who failed to provide photo identification with absentee ballots; and inherited residence voters who said they never lived in the state.
Discounting these votes, he argues, will rightfully hand him the victory. Griffin, however, has so far failed to prove in court that these voters would be ineligible.
During Friday's hearing, Judge John Tyson, a Republican, appeared focused on the question of voters' eligibility, asking counsel for Riggs, Ray Bennett, whether the voter bears the responsibility of proving their eligibility to vote.
Though Bennett affirmed that voting eligibility is subject to challenge, he made a distinction between eligibility and registration. He noted that the qualifications for voting outlined in the Constitution are appropriate grounds to challenge, but the Constitution and statute require that each voter be registered in order to cast a ballot.
"Every single one of these voters was registered. They were registered, they were on the books, they were on the voter rolls," Bennett said, adding later: "You can't scrub the registration records in the last 90 days, precisely to avoid the kind of mischief that can result if people start trying to say, 'Oh, well, these people shouldn't be registered, and others should be.' But you can still challenge somebody who's not eligible in those limited categories."
The panel also spent much of Friday's hearing interrogating the merits of Griffin's incomplete voter registration petition. At one point, Republican Appeals Court Judge Fred Gore asked if there still existed matching errors with voter information in the state Board of Election's database and what the court should do with that fact.
"I'm troubled that we're at 2025, and we still have voter identification errors sitting in our state registry. I'm troubled by that," Gore said. "And the fact that we haven't been able to get it right up until this point — I see why we have this [voter registration] challenge to a certain degree."
North Carolinians whose votes have been challenged under that petition previously told Salon that they suspected their registrations were flagged due to clerical errors in matching their names to their identification information; both would learn that their voter registrations did contain their Social Security numbers. The nature of Griffin's petition and how long it has dragged on, they said, has undermined their trust in the integrity of North Carolina's elections and courts, and dredged up fears for the future of democracy.
"I just feel incredibly heavy about the state of our democracy, and it feels like a very real possibility that we will no longer have free and fair elections in North Carolina," Hillsborough resident Spring Dawson-McClure told Salon in January.
Griffin's election challenge is now in its fourth month of litigation and is expected to return to the state Supreme Court.
