NC Supreme Court sparks fear by blocking certification of justice’s win

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court of North Carolina threw the election of one of its members into disarray on Tuesday as it temporarily blocked the certification of the Democrat incumbent’s narrow victory. The move gives the court time to consider a challenge by her Republican opponent, state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, who has cited debunked legal theories in his previous failed attempts to block Justice Allison Riggs’ reelection.

Griffin has sought for his claims to be decided by the Supreme Court he hopes to join, which is led by his mentor. On Monday, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump remanded Griffin’s challenge to the state Supreme Court. The state election board is now requesting a federal appeals court to return the case to federal court.

Riggs won reelection by 734 votes — a minuscule margin of victory that was confirmed by two recounts. She will remain on the court while the election results are being contested, though she has recused herself from this matter.

Griffin is asking the Supreme Court to throw out roughly 60,000 ballots — an unprecedented request based on a theory that has been dismissed by both the state election board and a federal judge.

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment. He previously declined to answer questions from ProPublica, saying that commenting on pending litigation would be a violation of the state’s judicial code of conduct.

“This is hugely dangerous for democracy in North Carolina,” said Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a voting advocacy organization. If the state Supreme Court sides with Griffin and overturns Riggs’ win, it would open the possibility for future candidates to “challenge the rules that were in place for elections and get votes retroactively discarded. If there’s a never-ending process of challenging election rules and results after the fact, our entire system could come to a standstill.”

This case is even more exceptional, Webb said, because “so far, Judge Griffin has not produced evidence of a single instance of voter fraud or illegal voting. He’s just vaguely raised the specter that there’s not been enough verification of voter identities and is using that to try to overturn an election.”

Griffin is arguing that voters in North Carolina’s elections database who are missing driver’s license or Social Security information should have their ballots discounted. That theory was originated and championed by far-right activists working with a conservative organization that was secretly preparing to contest election results if Trump had lost the 2024 election, ProPublica has reported. The organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

State election officials and a federal judge have rejected this theory multiple times, finding that there are many legitimate reasons for that information to be missing, including voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require those details. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in legal filings.

Neither Griffin nor the right-wing activists have proven a single case of voter fraud among the 60,000 ballots.

In a July 2024 call of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing activist argued that a candidate who lost a close election could use the theory to contest an outcome they did not agree with, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. When the chapter’s leader voiced concern about the theory’s legality, calling it “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, another activist said, “I guess we’re gonna find that out.” That activist’s data analyses and arguments then became the foundation for an attempt by the Republican National Committee to disqualify hundreds of thousands of voters before the election and Griffin’s attempt to overturn the election, ProPublica found.

ProPublica reported in December that Griffin has described Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and that Griffin wrote, when announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court: “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions regarding the December story.

Not all the Republican justices concurred with blocking the certification of Riggs’ victory. “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,” Republican Justice Richard Dietz wrote in a dissent, emphasizing that Griffin’s challenge to the 60,000 ballots was “almost certainly meritless.” He was joined by Democratic Justice Anita Earls, breaking ranks with the four other Republican members of the court.

Permitting Griffin’s litigation to proceed, Dietz stated, “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.”