The Republican candidate who narrowly trailed in the race for the North Carolina Supreme Court has asked the same court to throw out 60,000 ballots from last month’s election.
The move by appellate court judge Jefferson Griffin to the state Supreme Court comes a week after he lost a challenge before the North Carolina State Board of Elections in which he also sought to throw out those ballots. Griffin currently trails Democratic Judge Allison Riggs by just 734 votes.
Lawyers for Griffin’s campaign filed a lawsuit Wednesday evening asking the state Supreme Court to block the Democratic-controlled Board of Elections from counting those 60,000 ballots and from certifying the current results. Republicans have a 5-2 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
“In the 2024 general election, the administration’s mistakes changed the outcome of the election for the open seat on this Court,” Griffin’s attorneys wrote. “When these errors were again raised in valid election protests, the administration claimed it was too late to correct the violation of the law.”
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“He is now trying to accomplish what he has been striving for all along: getting the Republican-controlled Supreme Court to throw out legitimate ballots and hand this seat to him,” the party’s statement said.
The lawsuit in the battleground state race is the latest chapter in an ongoing saga since the November election.
Griffin and North Carolina Republicans have argued that the 60,000 votes in question should be invalidated because they were fraudulently cast by ineligible voters — an argument rejected by the state elections board last week. If the votes were tossed out, Griffin would lead the race.
Riggs, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023, narrowly emerged ahead of Griffin after Election Day, prompting a series of recounts.
A full machine recount and a partial manual recount of the race showed Riggs leading Griffin by 734 votes. More than 5.5 million votes were cast during the race.
NBC News has not yet predicted a winner in the race.
Following the original post-Election Day results, Griffin’s team filed hundreds of legal lawsuits in all 100 North Carolina counties, alleging that nearly 60,000 people had voted illegally. Many of the allegations centered on people who Griffin’s attorneys claimed did not have a driver’s license number or Social Security number on their voter registration. Their protests also targeted out-of-state voters who have not lived in North Carolina and who were unable to provide photo identification with their ballots.
The state elections board rejected all three categories of protests from Griffin and North Carolina Republicans last week, but has not yet formally certified the election results.
NCSBE spokesman Patrick Gannon said the board had “certified the vote totals” in the Riggs-Griffin race but cannot issue a certificate of election, which would be the final step, “until all protests and appeals have been reviewed.”
Earlier this month, the Democratic Party of North Carolina filed a lawsuit in federal court to ensure that all ballots in the race were counted. The preemptive effort noted that federal law does not allow states to throw out ballots because voter registration papers are missing a driver’s license or Social Security number.
The lawsuit also noted that Republicans filed a lawsuit prior to the election to purge 225,000 voters from the voter rolls who were missing the same information from their registration records. The case, filed in federal court, was dismissed.
Griffin’s latest lawsuit argues that his voting protests “raise questions that reserve our nation’s federalist system for state courts, not federal courts.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
