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State Supreme Court candidate Griffin wants the justices on that bench to help him win

Candidates for N.C. Supreme Court. Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, right, a Democrat, and challenger, Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, left. Riggs
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Candidates for N.C. Supreme Court. Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, right, a Democrat, and challenger, Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, left. Riggs narrowly defeated Griffin in the 2024 election, but Griffin is using every avenue to challenge the result.

A statewide machine recount and subsequent hand-to-eye recount of ballots from a percentage of randomly selected precincts and early voting sites confirmed the results of a race for an associate justice seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court: Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs defeated her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, by more than 700 votes.

But Griffin, a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, also filed protests seeking to invalidate more than 60,000 ballots. Last week, the Democratic-majority North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected Griffin's protests, finding first that he failed to give adequate notice to voters whose ballots were being challenged and, second, that he failed to establish a threshold amount of evidence of actual voting irregularities.

Now, Griffin has filed a writ of prohibition with the conservative majority state Supreme Court — the one he wants to serve on — asking the justices to step in, block certification of Riggs' victory, and to order the state elections board to throw out the challenged ballots.

In the bulk of protests, Griffin's campaign alleged thousands of ballots were cast by voters who had not properly registered. The issue was that these voters registered using an outdated form that preceded the enactment of the Help America Vote Act — or HAVA — and did not clearly mandate the registrant provide either the last four digits of their Social Security Number or a driver's license number.

While federal law, under HAVA, requires such identifying information for voter registration, the state elections board noted in its order rejecting Griffin's protests that "[n]o provision of North Carolina law clearly states that a county board may not process a registration application from a voter who does not provide one of these identification numbers."

What's more, the state board said Griffin's protests make a "factual assumption" and "unwarranted inference" the voters on the challenged list never provided the requisite data.

First, state law provides that an eligible person registering to vote but does not have a driver's license or social security number, may be given a unique identifier number.

Second, a voter's registration might lack one of the identifying numbers due to a clerical error. For example, if a registrant provides a driver's license or the last four digits of their social security number but the information is not put in correctly, it might not validate through a database match with other government databases, such as the DMV. In that case, the registrants' voter record will lack the number.

In October, a federal district court judge dismissed a claim filed by the North Carolina Republican Party arguing for the invalidation of 225,000 voter registrations on the same grounds as the Griffin protests, noting it was too close to the election to give voters a meaningful opportunity to address any deficiencies in their registration records.

In its order rejecting Griffin's protests, the state elections board said that when "a voter does everything the government requires of them to register, they possess the qualifications to vote, and they vote," then no violation, misconduct, or irregularity has occurred. Consequently, the board concluded, the Griffin campaign "failed to allege a protest that is actionable as a matter of law."

Along with Allison Riggs' parents, an editor at WUNC was among the tens of thousands of voters whose ballots were swept up in Griffin's protests.

The challenges before the state elections board also alleged some ballots should be discarded because they were cast by ineligible voters who live overseas. These protests claim children of overseas voters — for example, missionaries and military personnel — who had never resided in North Carolina, should not have been allowed to vote, though such voters are eligible under state law.

And still other challenges protested ballots cast by military and overseas personnel who voted but did not provide a photo ID with their mail-in ballots, even though state administrative code explicitly excuses such overseas voters from that requirement. The five-member board unanimously voted to dismiss protests over this issue. The votes on the other protest issues fell along party lines.

"The people of North Carolina deserve confidence in the administration of elections," North Carolina GOP Chairman Jason Simmons said in a statement issued to the media after Griffin filed his petition with the Supreme Court. "Safeguarding election integrity is critical to ensuring trust in the democratic process and the only way to protect the voices of lawful voters."

Anderson Clayton, chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, called Griffin's petition to the Supreme Court a "truly outlandish move" and accused the GOP candidate of trying to get "the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court to toss out legitimate ballots and hand this seat to him."

Rusty Jacobs is WUNC's Voting and Election Integrity Reporter.
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