A heated battle over a close Supreme Court election in North Carolina escalated last week when the trailing Republican candidate asked a court to throw out 60,000 ballots cast in the November election, a move that Democrats and other critics have charged is a product of the modern GOP's increasing hostility to democracy.
The Republican, Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, had challenged sitting Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs in the race to sit on North Carolina's highest court. He sued the state board of elections on Dec. 18 after it denied his electoral challenge last week. Griffin then asked the Republican-majority Supreme Court to stop the board from counting more than 60,000 votes, including provisional ballots and those cast overseas, and requested an immediate pause on the certification of the election results. The state board of elections removed the case to federal court the next day.
In an interview with Salon, Justice Riggs said she is "saddened and disappointed" that the effort to contest her narrow victory has reached this point.
"As a sitting judge, I take a solid oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of North Carolina and the United States — as does every sitting judge or justice in the state court — and we have an obligation, moral and constitutional, to respect the will of North Carolina voters," Riggs said.
Riggs, who was appointed to the Supreme Court seat in 2023, won the November election by just 734 votes out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast. Two recounts — one full machine and one partial hand recount — have since confirmed her slim victory, which isn't unprecedented in the state's Supreme Court elections.
In filing his election challenge, Griffin followed in the footsteps of President-elect Donald Trump and Arizona politician and Trump appointee Kari Lake, who both took aggressive and at times legally dubious actions to overturn their election losses. Griffin's escalation — bypassing state law that says county trial courts should hear appeals to election board decisions — also raises concerns about the precedent the GOP candidate's efforts set for the state's electoral processes going forward and whether it could serve as an election-denial model for others.
In the suit, Griffin's attorneys accuse the Democrat-controlled State Board of Elections of unlawfully and erroneously counting thousands of votes citing, in part, their incomplete voter registration applications — an argument the elections board rejected. Some registrations are incomplete because voters did not provide or were never asked to provide their driver's license or last four digits of their Social Security number.
A federal court ruling in favor of throwing out those votes would allow Griffin to take the lead in the race. The court, which is already hearing a related lawsuit from the North Carolina Democratic Party, could also rule against Griffin, which would prevent the GOP-led state Supreme Court from deciding in his favor. Indeed, U.S. Chief District Judge Richard Myers, appointed to the bench by Trump in 2019, last week ruled against Griffin's request for a temporary restraining order that would have blocked the certification of his loss.
As a former voting rights attorney and sitting judge, Riggs said she views respecting precedent as an obligation, pointing to North Carolina court, federal court and the state board's bipartisan vote to reject these electoral challenges. She said it's concerning that the suit suggests one can attempt to retroactively change state election rules after an election took place, which would fly in the face of a long-held election law principle prohibiting changes shortly before a race so as not to confuse voters.
Also of concern, she said, are the implications of the challenge on North Carolina's voters and their electoral choices.
"There are real people behind these challenges, and it's not politics — it's people's lives and their rights," Riggs said.
The attempt to invalidate a broad swath of the votes touches almost every North Carolinian, either because they are on the list or know someone who is. Riggs noted that her own parents' ballots have been challenged and recalled seeing her mother's confusion and father's indignation — producing his military ID, utility bills and other documents — after learning they were included on the list of voters flagged as ineligible.
"I continue to be distraught about the fact that my parents had about the best advice and insight they could receive because I was in this situation [to help them], and so many other North Carolinians did not," she said.
Riggs urged leaders across the nation to pay attention to the stories of her parents and other North Carolinians swept up in Griffin's legal effort to overturn her victory, "not out of any despair, but a sense of empowerment that we have to be vigilant" in defending democracy.
"We need to remember that this is about voters and their choices," she added. "Sometimes maybe democracy breaks your heart, but if you believe in the institutions and the dream that our founders had, I think you have to be willing to say, 'I am not going to try to burn things down if I don't win.'"
