Source: The News & Observer, ProPublica
Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who beat Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes but has yet to be awarded the win, promised supporters at a rally on Jan. 5 that she would prevail over Griffin.
According to The News & Observer, around 500 people attended the rally held at Halifax Mall in downtown Raleigh. There, Riggs promised the crowd that Democrats “will prove we won this election.”
At the rally, Riggs and other state Democrats thanked supporters for their votes that helped Democrats win five huge Council of State races, enough legislative races to take away the GOP’s supermajority and for reelecting Riggs.
“We will not stop until we have put this election fully to bed,” Riggs said. “We will make sure that our government is led by people who will protect your right to vote.”
Riggs’ win has been confirmed and reconfirmed by a statewide canvass, a statewide recount, and a partial hand-to-eye recount. Despite multiple counts and recounts requested by Griffin that showed he lost, he has refused to concede and instead filed a challenge seeking to throw out 60,000 legitimate votes using an argument that the State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has already rejected.
Griffin has argued that 60,000 legitimate votes should be thrown out because those voters’ registrations are missing a driver’s license number and/or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
According to the election-denying leader of North Carolina’s largest and most influential “election integrity” organization — the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network — the missing data is not because voters have done something wrong but is usually because of an administrative error by the state. Griffin’s argument is so extreme that election denial activists called it “voter suppression” and said it’s “100%” certain to fail in the courts, ProPublica reported.
Griffin’s baseless challenge has targeted active and retired servicemembers, elected officials across party lines, and tens of thousands of regular North Carolinians who did their civic duty — and he has angered and inconvenienced many thousands of voters in the process.
One of those voters was unaffiliated voter Christy Clausell of Raleigh, who spoke before Riggs and told the crowd she had voted since 2012 without issue. This year, though, she received a notice in the mail that her vote was being contested.
“I’ve never been targeted in any dirty political schemes,” she said, “but this feels very much like that.”
Clausell told rallygoers that after receiving her notice she reached out for an explanation from Democratic and Republican officials by email and voicemail. Democrats contacted her seven times, she said, and Republicans never responded. “Those actions will tell you who cares and who doesn’t,” she said.
Since the NCSBE has repeatedly dismissed Griffin’s challenges, he sued and asked the state Supreme Court, which has a 5 to 2 Republican majority, to intervene. The defendants quickly moved the case to federal court where it was put in front of U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of Donald Trump for consideration. Myers previously rejected the National and North Carolina Republican Party’s joint attempt to remove 225,000 people from the voter rolls using the same argument Griffin is now using. Griffin requested that Myers issue an injunction, otherwise the NCSBE could certify Riggs as the winner.
Although Myers had previously ruled against this specific argument, he changed his mind this time and issued an order to send Griffin’s case back to state court, NC Newsline reported.
The NCSBE and Riggs filed a notice of appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals as soon as the order was released on the evening of Jan. 6. The next morning, in what was reported to be a 5-1 ruling, Republicans on the state Supreme Court blocked state elections officials from certifying Riggs’s win over Griffin. The court’s majority opinion included a schedule for both sides to file all their arguments with the Supreme Court before the end of January. The ruling was amended late at night on Jan. 7 to reflect that Republican Justice Richard Dietz also dissented, resulting in a 4-2 ruling (Riggs recused herself from the case).
In Democratic Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls’s dissent, she wrote there was no reason to grant Griffin’s request to stop the certification because there was no proof he would be successful in his attempt to have 60,000 legitimate votes disqualified.
“There is no likelihood of success on the merits and the public interest requires that the Court not interfere with the ordinary course of democratic processes,” Earls wrote.
Dietz also dissented, writing that while he shares some of Griffin’s concerns about state election law, it’s too late to make any changes concerning the 2024 election.
“Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief,” he wrote. “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.”
