After a state court hearing on Friday, the attempt by North Carolina Republicans to toss out more than 60,000 ballots and overturn the election victory of Allison Riggs, a Democrat and state Supreme Court justice, looks poised to drag on for weeks if not months.
In the case, the Republican candidate, appellate court judge Jefferson Griffin, is ultimately seeking to have the GOP-led state Supreme Court hand him a victory by retroactively invalidating around 65,000 voters. Last November, Griffin lost by 734 votes, a defeat confirmed by two recounts.
At the hearing Friday, attorneys for Riggs, Jefferson and the state Board of Elections argued their cases at trial. A ruling is expected in the coming days, which will open the door to an appeal at the state level, with the state Supreme Court being the ultimate authority.
According to Griffin, tens of thousands of ballots should be thrown out because of incomplete voter registration records; in some cases, registrations lacked either a driver’s license number or Social Security number, in part due to bureaucratic errors. In separate protests, Griffin has claimed that some military and overseas voters either were never North Carolina residents or lacked voter identification.
In Wake County court Friday, an attorney for Riggs, Raymond Bennet, said that Griffin’s challenge is a “kind of retroactive disenfranchisement." He described it as "fundamentally unfair," arguing that "it's anti-democratic and it violates state law.”
“Judge Griffin concedes that not a single voter was ineligible based on the rules that were in place at the time of the election,” Bennett said. “Now he wants to change those rules.”
An attorney for Griffin, Craig Schauer, argued that their choice of which votes they would challenge in court was not a political decision. Griffin chose only to challenge the ballots of voters who had missing data in their voter file and who voted early or by mail, as opposed to challenging the voters of all voters with missing data. However, those who vote early and by mail tend to favor Democrats in North Carolina, whereas day-of voters tend to favor Republicans.
Earlier this week, Riggs and the state board of elections argued that the case would be rightly resolved in federal court, saying that tossing the votes of tens of thousands of voters is a federal legal issue. However, the Fourth Circuit ruled that the case should be litigated in state court first and that federal courts could take up the case if any federal legal issues were outstanding. This means the case could potentially play out through the court system, before being taken to federal court, paving the way for months of litigation.
The three-judge panel at the Fourth Circuit wrote: “if the [election] Board prevails in Wake County on the state law issues, the resolution of the federal claims may not be necessary." That effectively means that a victory in state court for Griffin could still result in a federal case, further delaying a final outcome.
In a statement after Friday's hearing, Riggs said she is determined to fight on. "I’m committed and honored to stand up for the rights of all North Carolinian voters, whether or not they voted for me," she said. "Today, my counsel and counsel for the North Carolina State Board of Elections exposed Judge Griffin’s challenges for what they are — baseless attempts to overturn an election that he lost and and in doing so, undermine North Carolina voters’ fundamental freedoms," Riggs said.
Griffin's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Chris Shenton, an attorney working with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a group that has filed amicus briefs in opposition to Griffin's attempt to toss votes, said he believes the legal battle will continue for some time.
“I think the conclusion from today is the same as it was before: there are going to be more steps in this litigation," Shenton told Salon. “The only way for this to end quickly is for Judge Griffin to admit that these voters did nothing wrong, and North Carolinians simply did not choose him to serve on their Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it seems like Judge Griffin refuses to accept their word and intends to litigate this until he’s out of options or out of courts to appeal to. It is a brazen disregard for the democratic process.”
In the case, voting rights organizations like the Southern Coalition for Social Justice have highlighted insufficiencies in Griffin’s argument, as well as the fact that “the voices of the thousands of challenged voters themselves have been glaringly absent.”
“Stunningly, Judge Griffin fails to allege any evidence that even a single one of these voters is actually ineligible to vote in North Carolina — only that they should have anticipated his unprecedented challenges and followed an alternative hypothetical set of rules, never provided to them by the state, when casting their ballot,” wrote attorneys for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in an amicus brief. “This failure to allege, let alone prove, that any of the challenged voters is actually ineligible to vote in North Carolina is a sufficient, independent ground to reject Judge Griffin’s protest.”
In an affidavit, Cindy Oats Anthony, a Gaston County resident whose ballot has been challenged, explained that she “presented her driver’s license when she voted early in the November 2024 General Election.”
“She learned that her name was on the list of voters challenged by Judge Griffin from a member of her church, and contacted the Jackson County Board of Elections to confirm that she did provide her driver’s license number on her registration form,” the statement reads. “If her ballot were discarded, she would feel like a fundamental right were taken away, and she would wonder what this means for all of the elections that have occurred.”
Anthony isn’t the only voter who voted with her driver's license either. Amy Grace Bryan, a physician in Durham, said that she “used her North Carolina driver’s license to vote without any complications.”
When she found out the Republican was challenging her vote, “She initially thought that it was junk mail because it was addressed to ‘Amy Bryan or current resident.”
“She eventually found her name on this list of voters whose registration was being questioned by Judge Griffin’s campaign. Dr. Bryant has reached out to the Griffin campaign and has not received any response,” her statement reads. “Bryant believes this entire process is unfair and that to cancel her vote along with the 60,000 others would be a blow to our democracy.”
