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The Republican-controlled state Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled on Tuesday to block the certification of a Democratic candidate for justice, entertaining dubious claims of election fraud from her Republican opponent seeking to toss out tens of thousands of votes in the 2024 election.
Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs — who abstained from the decision because it involved her own election — won the statewide race against Republican Jefferson Griffin by a mere 734 votes. Two recounts have since confirmed that outcome, but Griffin continues to dispute the election, leveling Trumpian accusations that Riggs won due to fraud.
Griffin claims that voters without driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file should not have been allowed to vote — such missing information on their voter files is not inherently a sign of voter fraud, however, and could be indicative of a bureaucratic mistake rather than an attempt to illegally cast a ballot. Although Griffin’s initial challenge to the State Board of Elections in December was dismissed, he appealed to the courts, demanding that 60,000 such votes be tossed from the official count.
The state Supreme Court sided with Griffin in a 4-2 vote, with all four ruling justices being Republicans. The only other Democrat on the court, plus one Republican justice, dissented against the ruling.
The ruling could have incredibly detrimental consequences, Republican Justice Richard Dietz said in his dissent, noting that it will “lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”
One justice who sided with the majority said their decision was based on wanting to grant Griffin the opportunity for his grievances to be heard, even though he likely wouldn’t succeed on merit. If that justice sides with the current dissenting ones in this case, it will likely lead to a 3-3 split, meaning that a lower court order ruling against Griffin’s inauspicious argument would stand.
Notably, if Griffin were to succeed in purging votes, large groups of people could be disenfranchised as a result — one analysis found, for example, that Black voters were twice as likely to have their votes challenged by Griffen than white voters were.
Gene Nichol, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, blasted Griffin for his attempts to throw out legitimate votes in an op-ed for The Charlotte Observer.
“Jefferson Griffin thinks his fanciful, already judicially-rejected, election-busting ideological claim counts more than the personal franchise of tens of thousands of Tar-Heel citizens,” Nichol wrote. “He also likely has a quiet confidence that the most partisan state supreme court in the United States — which he is anxious to join — will ignore the law and sweep him in.”
Anderson Clayton, the chair of North Carolina’s Democratic Party, said Griffin would ultimately fail to toss voters’ ballots out.
“[Griffin] is hellbent on finding new ways to overthrow this election,” Clayton said in a statement. “But we are confident that the evidence will show, like they did throughout multiple recounts, that [Riggs] is the rightful winner in this race.”
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