RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A candidate who trailed in a very close election for the North Carolina Supreme Court asked that court Wednesday to intervene and prevent election officials from counting more than 60,000 votes in his race that he claims have not been lawfully released.
Jefferson Griffin, a Republican member of the Court of Appeals, filed the intervention request with the Supreme Court in his race with Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs. After recounts and protest hearings initiated by Griffin and other Republican candidates, Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million votes cast for the Nov. 5 election. The Associated Press has not yet called the race.
The State Board of Elections voted last week to reject the protests. Typically, the next step for a disgruntled candidate trying to prevent the board from issuing a certificate of election to his rival is to appeal to the Wake County Superior Court. Riggs has declared himself the winner and his campaign has said Griffin must concede.
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But Griffin instead went to the Supreme Court and asked the justices to rule next Monday on his request to prevent a certificate from being issued to Riggs and to extend the 10-day deadline for filing an appeal in Wake District Court County to suspend.
Griffin’s attorneys said the delay will give the justices time to consider his arguments for why three categories of votes cast should not be counted in his race with Riggs. Five Republicans sit on the seven-member Supreme Court, which has been a partisan flashpoint in the state over the past two years in lawsuits over redistricting, photo voter identification and other voting rights.
The state Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in federal court earlier this month in an effort to stop the board from throwing out the ballots, which it says would violate the U.S. Constitution and election laws. Democratic officials have said they fear the Supreme Court will ultimately side with Republicans and throw out the disputed ballots, threatening a Riggs victory. Going directly to the Supreme Court with Wednesday’s filing would avoid further delays if state Democrats wanted to move the case to federal court, Griffin’s letter said.
The challenges raised again by Griffin on Wednesday focus on three categories of ballots: ballots cast by people with voter registration who do not have driver’s licenses or contain partial Social Security numbers; foreign voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were considered residents of North Carolina; and military or overseas voters who did not provide a copy of their photo ID with their ballot.
The state board, made up of three Democrats and two Republicans, rejected Griffin’s protests in a series of votes that fell largely along party lines, with all but one voting 3-2. The board’s written order stated in part that there was no reasonable basis showing that an election law had been violated or that irregularities had occurred.
Griffin attorney Troy Shelton rejected Riggs’ arguments that his client tried to change election rules after the election. For example, the registration requirement went into effect in 2004, while residency requirements for voting in North Carolina date back to 1776.
“The board was required to disregard votes cast in violation of state law,” Shelton wrote Wednesday.
But board Chairman Alan Hirsch said at the protest hearing last week that the idea of a registered voter receiving the vote he cast is “anathema to the democratic system and simply cannot be tolerated.”
Last week’s rejected protests also came from three Republican legislative candidates who trailed in their respective General Assembly elections. Appeals of dozens of additional protests also filed by Griffin and the legislative candidates — but first considered by county boards — will be heard by the State Board of Elections on Friday. The AP did not call two of these races.
Once the protests for the General Assembly candidates are exhausted, they can no longer go to court, but formally ask the General Assembly chamber to decide who won the seat they are seeking.
In one of the seats, Republican state Rep. Frank Sossamon trails Democratic challenger Bryan Cohn by about 230 votes. A Cohn victory would leave Republicans one seat short of retaining their current veto-proof majority starting next month.
