RALEIGH, N.C. (CN) — Over a month after the election, a North Carolina Supreme Court race is still uncertified and tangled up in the court system.
Republican Jefferson Griffin has challenged the results of his race against North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Allison Riggs since the tide turned in Riggs’ favor.
After preemptively suing the state board of elections over the release of election records, he challenged the results of the race in court. He has filed election protests with the state board of elections — disputing the validity of over 60,000 votes — along with petitions in local court, the state court of appeals and, on Wednesday, at the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Riggs said Thursday that she would recuse herself if her opponent’s legal challenges to the election were heard by the court.
In his petition Griffin asked the state’s highest court to intervene before the state board certifies the election, and keep it from counting ballots he claims were unlawfully cast.
“Voters elected me to uphold our state and federal constitutions. I will continue to work to ensure that every valid vote counts in this election,” Riggs said.“These more than 60,000 voters are our neighbors, our friends, our family members, and brave citizens who risk their lives to defend our country.”
The state board of elections, which dismissed Griffin’s election protests last week, moved Thursday to remove his petition to the Supreme Court down to a lower state court. Griffin is also an intervenor defendant in a legal challenge raised by the North Carolina Democratic Party, which warned the state board that discarding ballots would be conducting post-election voter roll maintenance.
Griffin, who is a court of appeals judge, declined to comment on the topic.
“I don’t comment on pending litigation,” he said in a comment to Courthouse News. “It would be a violation of our code of judicial conduct.”
Supreme Court supermajority
The political makeup of the state Supreme Court is five Republican justices and two Democrats, leaving an overwhelming Republican majority with Rigg’s recusal should Griffin’s election challenges return to the judges.
The North Carolina Senate Democratic Caucus contends that Griffin’s decision to send the issue straight to the Supreme Court is an attempt to change the results of the election and block legally cast ballots.
“If the Republican supermajority on the state Supreme Court becomes complicit in this scheme to override the will of the voters, it will inflict devastating and perhaps irreparable damage to the court’s legitimacy and institutional integrity,” it said in a statement. “The people’s faith in the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of justice hangs in the balance.”
Senator Sydney Batch, the incoming Senate minority leader, also called the move partisan.
“The Republican Party’s attempt to block legally cast ballots in North Carolina is both shameful and dangerous,” she said. “This isn’t just about one race—it’s about protecting the integrity of our democracy.”
The disputed ballots include the votes of “never residents,” or adult children of former North Carolina residents who have never lived in the U.S., and those of overseas voters who did not provide a photocopy of their photo ID with their ballot, as in-person and absentee voters were required to do.
Ballots cast by residents who filed out an old voter registration form that didn’t require them to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a social security number are also challenged, as the eligibility of the voter was not confirmed prior to legislation. Included among the challenged votes are Riggs’ parents.
The state board can’t count ballots of voters who have never lived in North Carolina, Griffin says, and counting ballots without proof of ID is a violation of state law. The state board of elections should have confirmed the eligibility of the voters who filed out the old forms before they were allowed to cast ballots, he said, to confirm that they are lawful citizens eligible to vote.
“The results of an election cannot be tainted by ballots unlawfully cast,” Griffin said in his petition to the Supreme Court. “Judge Griffin’s protests satisfy the legal standards established in the election-protest statutes and, therefore, the court should order that any unlawful vote be discounted.”
The state board of elections, which removed the case to a lower court, said Thursday that it can’t certify the election until the board has decided on all pending protests, which it plans to do on Friday. The soonest the election results could be certified is Jan. 3, 2025, it said, and only if all of the protests were dismissed.
If his protests are dismissed, Griffin could appeal the board’s decision to Wake County Superior Court, in Raleigh, within 10 days, and potentially prevent the board from certifying results while an election stay pends.
The state board said when it dismissed several of Griffin’s protests last week, that Griffin did not “establish probable cause to believe that a violation of election law or irregularity or misconduct occurred in the protested elections.”
Griffin, who requested two recounts in the associate justice race, still trails Riggs by 734 votes. Riggs has claimed victory in the race, but Griffin has not conceded it.
The state board is scheduled to consider more of Griffin’s protests originally weighed by county boards on Friday.