Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin has won, in part, his effort to throw out thousands of voters’ ballots from the 2024 elections. On Friday the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected some of Griffin’s challenges but kept others alive, paving the way for him to potentially be declared the winner of last year’s race for a seat on the Supreme Court.
The ruling in Griffin’s favor was mostly along party lines: The 4-2 decision saw one of the court’s Republican justices break party ranks, while the rest joined in the majority ruling for Griffin.
North Carolina’s highest court issued a mixed ruling Friday in the ongoing legal saga over the 2024 election between state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs (D) and her Republican challenger, appeals court judge Jefferson Griffin.
Per today’s ruling, around 60,000 ballots with incomplete registrations cast in the 2024 state Supreme Court election will be counted. The Court also issued a 30-day cure period for the roughly 5,000 overseas military voters who did not provide proper photo ID when they registered to vote. But the Court greenlit the decision of a lower court to reject around 200 ballots cast by overseas voters who are registered to vote in North Carolina but never resided in the state. Those ballots will not be counted.
Riggs said in a statement that she will immediately ask the federal courts to intervene in the case.
This is disenfranchising of voters and raises the risk of election subversion. It’s unprecedented, as Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg explained about the earlier Court of Appeals ruling, and it violates due process rights of voters (and potentially other federally protected rights) by changing the rules after the fact, as Rick Pildes and Justin Levitt explained.
I hope that the federal courts will now correct this due process violation. As Judge Earls wrote in her dissent:
I have no doubt that this special order, upending years of precedent, violating due process, resulting in the discarding of thousands of legitimate votes, and issued with unseemly haste as though quickly ripping the bandage off the deep wound to our democracy will hurt less, marks one of the lowest points of illegitimacy in this I look forward to the day when our Court will return to the rule of law and act to resolve the critical issues implicated in matters such as this with clarity, transparency, and even treatment for all voters and candidates.