The Republican majority on North Carolina’s supreme court blocked election officials from certifying the win of a Democratic justice on Tuesday after her opponent made attempts to toss out tens of thousands of votes.
Allison Riggs, a Democratic supreme court justice in North Carolina with a background as a voting rights lawyer, won re-election in November by 734 votes over the appellate judge Jefferson Griffin. Recounts confirmed her victory.
But on Tuesday, the supreme court, which currently has a 5-2 Republican majority, granted a temporary stay at Griffin’s urging, laying the groundwork to overturn Riggs’s election. The court set deadlines for briefing the case for later this month, meaning the state board of elections will not be able to certify the election results as scheduled this week. Riggs has recused herself from the case before the court.
Griffin filed challenges claiming about 60,000 people had voted who should not have been allowed to, mostly those who did not have a driver’s license number or social security digits in their voter registration record, though it is not clear if registrants signed up to vote before requirements were in place or that they would not be able to provide the information. He sought to disqualify their votes.
“These voters were not eligible to cast a ballot without first lawfully registering,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote in their initial brief to the state board.
The state board of elections, where Democrats have a 3-2 majority, rejected those challenges. Griffin sought the state supreme court’s intervention.
The state board of elections tried to move the case to federal court because it dealt with questions of voter eligibility issues at the federal level, but the federal court on Monday sent the case to the North Carolina supreme court, agreeing with Griffin’s lawyers that it was a matter for state courts.
On Tuesday, the state supreme court issued the stay, writing in its order: “This matter should be addressed expeditiously because it concerns certification of an election.”
Democrats and democracy advocates have said the move is an attempt to circumvent Riggs’s victory and disenfranchise voters who elected Riggs.
Roy Cooper, the state’s former Democratic governor, said on X: “Allison Riggs won and the recount confirmed it. Republicans want to toss thousands of legal votes in the trash because they don’t like the outcome. This shouldn’t be about party politics – this should be about making sure every vote counts & that our elections still mean something.”
In an amended order filed on Tuesday, Justice Trey Allen wrote that he wanted to “stress that the Court’s order granting Judge Griffin’s motion for temporary stay should not be taken to mean that Judge Griffin will ultimately prevail on the merits”.
Another justice, Richard Dietz, wrote that while he believed some of the challenges to eligibility had merit, he disagreed with granting the stay because the issue “comes too late”.
“Although these challenges to our state’s election laws and regulations might be meritorious, they are not ones that can change the rules of an election after the voters of our state already went to the polls and voted.”
In a press conference in December, the state Democratic party said it feared how Republicans in the state were attempting to overturn the election results.
“What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve,” the state Democratic party chair, Anderson Clayton, said.
