The GOP-controlled North Carolina State Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked certification of liberal justice Allison Riggs’ 2024 victory, allowing the Republican who lost the race to present his argument about why 60,000 ballots cast in the race should be thrown out.
Riggs, an incumbent on the court, defeated Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by 748 votes—a narrow victory that was affirmed by two recounts.
But Griffin is refusing to concede and instead wants the court to throw out 60,000 ballots based on a ridiculous claim that those voters were illegally registered. Griffin claims those voters did not put their Social Security or driver’s license numbers on their voter registration forms, rendering their votes invalid.
State and national Republicans used that same argument to try and purge 225,000 voters from the rolls in North Carolina before ballots were cast in the 2024 election. But both the State Board of Elections and a federal judge ruled against the Republicans in that case.
Now Griffin wants the court to retroactively disqualify voters—many of them Democratic—so that he can be declared the winner of a race he lost.
The argument Griffin is making is so extreme that even election deniers think it’s wrong, according to a December report by the investigative news outlet ProPublica.
From the ProPublica report:
The theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow promoted it with the help of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.
State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack … those details.
Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot—most often with a driver’s license.
If the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court rules in Griffin’s favor, they will be stealing a seat that Democrats rightfully won.
“This is extremely concerning,” Carolina Forward, a progressive think tank in North Carolina, wrote in a post on X. “NC Republicans could be preparing to actually nullify a valid election, simply because it didn’t go their way. Even in North Carolina, and even in these times, this is a massive escalation and a frontal assault on our state’s basic democracy.”
Hundreds of people rallied with Riggs on Sunday to draw attention to the GOP effort to steal the state Supreme Court seat she won.
Christy Clausell, an unaffiliated voter who has been registered in the state since 2012, is one of the 60,000 people whose ballots Griffin is trying to throw out.
“I’ve never been targeted in any dirty political scheme, but this feels very much like that,” Clausell said at the event, according to a report from NC Newsline.
Clausell added, “I definitely don’t want anyone representing me on our state’s highest court who exercises blatantly dishonorable tactics to get what they want versus serving the people who vote for them.”
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