The Republican who is only behind in the race for the Supreme Court of North Carolina has requested that the court invalidate 60,000 ballots from the election that was held last month.
A week after losing a lawsuit before the North Carolina State Board of Elections in which he also attempted to have those ballots thrown out, Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the appeals court, was promoted to the state Supreme Court. Griffin is now only 734 votes behind Democratic Justice Allison Riggs.
Griffin’s campaign lawyers filed a lawsuit Wednesday night asking the state Supreme Court to reject the current results and prevent the Democratic-controlled elections board from counting nearly 60,000 ballots. On the Supreme Court of North Carolina, Republicans hold a 5-2 majority.
Griffin’s lawyers stated that the Board’s mistakes affected the outcome of the election for the vacant seat on this Court in the general election of 2024. The Board then asserted that it was too late to correct its violation of the law when those mistakes were brought up once more in legitimate election protests.
The North Carolina Democratic Party, in a post on X, denounced the lawsuit as a very outrageous action, likening it to a five alarm fire and charging that Griffin had escalated his assault on voters.
According to the party’s statement, he is now attempting to accomplish what he has always wanted: persuading the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court to throw out valid ballots and give him this seat.
The lawsuit in the contested state race is the most recent development in a long-running story that began with the election in November.
The state elections board rejected Griffin’s and North Carolina Republicans’ argument last week that the 60,000 ballots in question should be void because they were cast by improperly registered voters. Griffin would be in the lead if the ballots were thrown out.
Following Election Day, Riggs—who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023—came out just ahead of Griffin, leading to a series of recounts.
Both a partial hand recount and a full machine recount revealed that Riggs was ahead of Griffin by 734 votes. The contest received over 5.5 million ballots.
The winner of the race has not yet been predicted by NBC News.
After Election Day, Griffin’s team filed hundreds of legal challenges in all 100 counties of North Carolina, claiming that over 60,000 persons had cast illegitimate ballots. Many of the accusations focused on individuals who, according to Griffin’s attorneys, did not have a Social Security number or driver’s license number on file in their voter registration records. They also objected to foreign voters who hadn’t resided in North Carolina and who didn’t provide a photo ID with their ballots.
Griffin and North Carolina Republicans’ three types of protests were denied by the state elections board last week, but the election results have not yet been officially certified.
The board has “certified the vote totals” in the Riggs-Griffin contest, according to NCSBE spokesperson Patrick Gannon, but it is unable to issue a certificate of election—the last step—”until all protests and appeals are adjudicated.”
In an effort to guarantee that every ballot in the election was tallied, the North Carolina Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in federal court earlier this month. The preemptive action noted that states are prohibited by federal law from discarding ballots due to the absence of a Social Security number or driver’s license number on voter registration forms.
The lawsuit also pointed out that Republicans had sued to have 225,000 voters removed from the lists because their registration records lacked the same information prior to the election. The federal court case that was filed was dismissed.
According to Griffin’s most recent complaint, his vote protests pose issues that our country’s federalist system saves for state courts rather than federal ones.
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