Republican Griffin asks NC Supreme Court to intervene in his challenge of 60,000 ballots
Republican Jefferson Griffin is asking the North Carolina Supreme Court to intervene in his effort to challenge over 60,000 ballots cast in his race for the high court.
The State Board of Elections dismissed Griffin’s ballot protests, but has not taken a final step of certifying the election. Griffin now asks the court, which has a 5 to 2 Republican majority, to prohibit the board from certifying the election and to throw out the challenged ballots.
“At bottom, this case presents a fundamental question: who decides our election laws? Is it the people and their elected representatives, or the unelected bureaucrats sitting on the State Board of Elections?” Griffin argued in a legal filing on Wednesday. “If the board gets its way, then it is the real sovereign here.”
Griffin, who trails Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs by 734 votes following two recounts of the results, argues that the state improperly counted ballots from ineligible voters across the state which, if removed from the vote count, could swing the race in his favor.
In a news release, North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said Griffin has “refused to face reality and admit that he lost the Supreme Court race.”
“... He is now trying to achieve what’s been aiming for all along: getting the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court to toss out legitimate ballots and hand this seat to him,” she said.
State law permits judicial candidates who’ve filed election protests to appeal the state board’s decision to Wake County Superior Court. In Wednesday’s filing, however, Griffin argued that if he took that step, Democrats would immediately try to move the case to federal court.
By intervening, he said, the state Supreme Court would “protect this court’s jurisdiction to decide the questions of law that are raised in Griffin’s election protests — questions that our nation’s system of federalism reserves for state courts, not federal courts.”
His request comes after Democrats filed their own lawsuit in federal court seeking to have Griffin’s protests thrown out.
State Board of Elections dismissed Griffin’s protests
Riggs’ legal team has argued that Griffin is using unsubstantiated legal theories to throw out legitimate votes in hopes of overturning the election results.
The State Board of Elections, voting mostly along party lines, agreed with Riggs and dismissed all of Griffin’s protests last week.
“The idea that someone could have been registered to vote, came to vote and then has their vote discarded is anathema to the democratic system and simply cannot be tolerated,” Board Chair Alan Hirsch, a Democrat, said.
While the board currently has a 3-2 Democratic majority, Republicans will likely take control next spring under a new law passed by the legislature.
The majority of Griffin’s protests revolve not around specific allegations of fraud, but rather legal arguments about voter eligibility which have so far been rejected by state and federal courts.
The largest group of challenged voters are those who do not have a driver’s license number or Social Security number attached to their voter registration.
Griffin argues that these voters were improperly registered and should not have their ballots counted.
The Republican National Committee also made this argument in a lawsuit filed this summer which sought to purge 225,000 voters from the rolls. A federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump rejected part of the RNC’s argument, though the case is still ongoing.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats on the election board pointed out that lacking these numbers on a voter registration does not, in and of itself, make a voter ineligible. Clerical errors and matching issues with national databases could account for some of the missing information.
In addition, all voters were required to show ID in this election, they argued.
“There’s nothing those individuals could have done — as far as they could tell, they were properly registered,” Hirsch said.
Republicans on the board, however, said that the board should have addressed this issue earlier when it was brought to their attention that a sizable amount of voters did not have this information in the state’s database.
Stacy “Four” Eggers called it a “self-inflicted wound” and said the state should have asked the affected voters to provide these documents during the most recent primary and general elections.
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This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 5:15 PM.
