A heated battle over North Carolina’s tight Supreme Court election escalated last week when the pursuing Republican candidate asked a court to throw out 60,000 ballots cast in the November election, a move that Democrats and other critics have denounced is a product of the modern Republican Party’s increasing hostility toward democracy.
Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin had challenged incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs in the race to serve on North Carolina’s highest court. He sued the state Board of Elections on December 18 after it rejected his electoral challenge last week. Griffin then asked the Republican-majority Supreme Court to prevent the board from counting more than 60,000 votes, including provisional ballots and votes cast abroad, and requested an immediate pause in the certification of election results. The state Board of Elections took the case to federal court the next day.
In an interview with Salon, Judge Riggs said she is “saddened and disappointed” that the effort to challenge her narrow victory has reached this point.
“As a sitting judge, I take a firm oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of North Carolina and the United States – as any sitting judge or state court judge does – and we have a moral and constitutional obligation to uphold the Constitution respect. will of North Carolina voters,” Riggs said.
Riggs, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2023, won the November election by just 734 votes out of more than 5.7 million cast. Two recounts — a full machine recount and a partial manual recount — have since confirmed her narrow victory, which is not unprecedented in state Supreme Court elections.
In filing his election challenge, Griffin followed in the footsteps of newly elected President Donald Trump and Arizona politician and Trump appointee Kari Lake, both of whom took aggressive and sometimes legally questionable actions to reverse their election losses. Griffin’s escalation — sidestepping state law that says county courts must hear appeals of election board decisions — also raises concerns about the precedent the Republican candidate’s efforts are setting for the state’s future election processes and whether it would can serve as an election denial model for others.
In the lawsuit, Griffin’s attorneys accuse the Democratic-controlled State Board of Elections of unlawfully and erroneously counting thousands of votes, citing in part their incomplete voter registration applications — an argument the board of elections rejected. Some registrations are incomplete because voters did not provide their driver’s license or the last four digits of their Social Security number or were never asked for them.
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 Democratic Party of North Carolina, could also rule against Griffin, which would prevent the Republican Party-led Supreme Court from ruling in his favor. Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, appointed to the court by Trump in 2019, ruled last week against Griffin’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have blocked recognition of his loss.
As a former voting rights attorney and sitting judge, Riggs said she views respecting precedent as an obligation, pointing to the North Carolina state court, the federal court and the state legislature’s bipartisan vote to reject these electoral challenges. She said it’s troubling that the lawsuit suggests you could try to change election rules retroactively after an election has taken place, which would violate a long-standing principle of election law that prohibits changes shortly before a race to not to confuse voters.
Also concerning, she said, are the implications of the challenge for North Carolina voters and their election choices.
“There are real people behind these challenges, and it’s not politics – it’s people’s lives and their rights,” Riggs said.
The effort to invalidate a large portion of votes affects almost every North Carolinian, either because he or she is on the ballot or knows someone who is. Noting that her own parents’ ballots were challenged, Riggs recalled her mother’s confusion and her father’s outrage — with his military ID, utility bills and other documents — after learning they had been included on the voter rolls who were classified as ineligible to vote.
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“I’m still distraught that my parents had the best advice and insight they could get because I was in this situation [to help them]and so many other North Carolina residents don’t,” she said.
Riggs urged leaders across the country to pay attention to the stories of her parents and other North Carolinians involved in Griffin’s legal effort to overturn her victory, “not out of desperation, but out of a sense of empowerment that we must be vigilant’. defending democracy.
“We must remember that this is about voters and their choices,” she added. “Sometimes democracy may break 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’m not going to try to burn the place down if I don’t win. .'”
