RALEIGH, N.C. (CN) — The North Carolina Democratic Party sued the state board of elections in federal court Friday, asking for a judgment preventing the board from removing over 60,000 challenged ballots from the 2024 election results.
Several Republican candidates in close races have filed election protests — including North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, who filed petitions Friday demanding the elections board speed up its decision on his race for a state Supreme Court justice seat. He is challenging the eligibility of over 60,000 voters as he trails his Democrat opponent in a second race recount.
The board of elections is expected to hold a hearing over the protests next week, and has asserted jurisdiction over three categories of protests.
The election protests challenge ballots by U.S. citizens who have not lived in the United States, but whose parents resided in North Carolina before moving, along with ballots cast by overseas citizens who did not include a photocopy of their photo ID. The protests have also taken issue with ballots from many voters who registered to vote with an old form that didn’t require them to provide a driver’s license number or last four digits of their social security number.
Unlike most election challenges, the party says, the protests are systematic claims, and do not challenge the eligibility of individual voters.
It claims that if the board proceeds, it could violate the Fourteenth Amendment and the Help America Vote Act by discarding votes without giving voters the opportunity to be heard.
“The state cannot simply change the rules after an election and claim it is lawful because it gave voters notice and a chance to be heard. For instance, North Carolina could not now decide that it is only going to count the votes of those who voted in person (rather than by absentee ballot), even if it gave all voters notice and a hearing,” the party argues in its complaint.
Pointing to North Carolina law regarding voter eligibility, the Democratic Party claims that a voter needs to be challenged by the time of the election, and the challenger must present “affirmative, individualized proof that the voter is ineligible to cast a ballot.” The voter must also be notified and given an opportunity to speak.
Instead of using this process, Republicans attempted to “disenfranchise specified categories of voters en masse,” the party argues in their suit, saying the North Carolina Republican Committee contacted the challenged voters by postcard, but provided vague information and failed to tell them they have the opportunity to be heard at a hearing.
Prior to the election, the North Carolina Republican Party had filed suit challenging the voting rolls, claiming that 225,000 voters who registered to vote under an old form may not be eligible voters, and asking that they be required to validate their information to vote or be removed from the list of registered voters. The case is currently pending in federal court, after Republicans failed in their argument that by violating the federal voting statute the board also violated state voting laws, and that the case should be handled in state court.
Similarly, the Republican National Committee argued in a separate lawsuit that adult children of U.S. citizens born and living abroad should be barred from voting in North Carolina, even though their parents were formerly North Carolina citizens.
According to the Democratic Party, the claims made in these previous lawsuits echo the ones made in the election protests and did not succeed in impacting voting eligibility. If the state board were to proceed and invalidate ballots this late post-election, they would be violating the National Voter Registration Act, it says.
“By endeavoring to throw away the already-cast votes of large swaths of voters based on generic legal challenges, the protests, in essence, call for retroactive post-election voter-roll maintenance. That is barred by the NVRA,” the party writes.
The state Democratic Party seeks a declaratory judgment from the court instructing the board that federal law prohibits it from removing votes in response to mass challenges.
Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who is running for reelection against Griffin, filed a brief in opposition to his protests with the state board Friday night.
‘“Having failed to win over the voters, Judge Griffin now pleads his case here. He asks the board to change the voting rules, decide that tens of thousands of voters failed to comply with those changed rules, and then throw out their votes for failure to anticipate the new rules,” she writes. “Whether playing a board game, competing in a sport, or running for public office, the runner-up cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by asking for a redo under a different set of rules. The board should deny the protests as an illegal attempt to change the election rules after the votes have been cast and counted.”
A representative for the state board of elections declined to comment on the case.
