Democrats are sounding the alarm over Republican efforts to overturn a key loss in North Carolina's close Supreme Court race, decrying state Appellate Court Judge Jefferson Griffin's legal challenge that seeks to have the state Board of Elections throw out enough votes to put him ahead. Those efforts, Democrats argue, ignore the will of North Carolina voters and pose a threat to democracy in the state — and nationwide.
"Our country is known as a beacon of democracy and Judge Jefferson Griffin, in our state, is on the front lines of dismantling that creed," North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton told reporters Monday.
Griffin's challenge to his electoral defeat has garnered increased national attention since the state Supreme Court agreed to block certification of the election result last week. North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, led Griffin in the 2024 race by just 734 votes; two recounts at the end of last year confirmed her victory. The North Carolina Board of Elections last month also rejected Griffin's claims that tens of thousands of ineligible votes were counted in the November election, prompting Griffin to ask the state Supreme Court to toss out those ballots.
Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, told reporters Monday that the implications of Republicans working to overturn "free and fair elections" are "devastating" for Riggs, the millions of North Carolinians who elected her and future elections.
"If they are successful in this scheme, there will be copycat lawsuits across this country for races where they don't like the result," he warned.
The case before the North Carolina Supreme Court is just one of a handful of election result protests in state and federal courts filed by Griffin or the Republican Party. Each case makes roughly the same ask: to temporarily pause election certification and, subsequently, throw out more than 60,000 votes counted in the 2024 election. Those votes, Griffin and the Republican National Committee argue, were cast by people who failed to fully complete their voter registrations by omitting their driver's license information or the last four digits of their social security numbers.
On Monday night, the Wake County Superior Court rejected the RNC's request for a preliminary injunction forcing the state election board to cast aside alleged ineligible votes and toss those from voters who fail to provide adequate identification, following the Democratic National Committee's intervention in the suit last Friday. Griffin also has an additional case before the Wake County Superior Court seeking to have votes thrown out from the November count.
In the case before the Republican-majority North Carolina Supreme Court, which Riggs has recused herself from, the justices last week voted 4-2 to block certification of the election results to consider Griffin's petition. In the amended order, released last Wednesday, the justices offered an additional explanation for their decision.
"I write separately to stress that the Court’s order granting Judge Griffin’s motion for temporary stay should not be taken to mean that Judge Griffin will ultimately prevail on the merits," Republican Justice Trey Allen wrote in the concurring opinion.
By ordering the stay, he added, the court "has merely ensured that it will have adequate time to consider" Griffin's arguments.
Two justices, Democrat Anita Earls and Republican Richard Dietz, dissented. Earls argued that Griffin's arguments had "no likelihood of success on the merits," while Dietz cited the Purcell principle, which prohibits judicial interventions in election laws and rules shortly before a vote to avoid confusion and casting doubt on the election's integrity.
"The petition is, in effect, post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process," Dietz wrote. "The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of our elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid."
Though dissenting, Dietz argued that two of Griffin's claims of voter ineligibility — regarding photo identification and residency in North Carolina — likely had merit had they been made well in advance of the election.
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In his lawsuit, Griffin argues that more than 60,000 votes cast in the 2024 election were unlawful. The voters who cast them, he claimed, had incomplete registrations — the alleged case for the overwhelming majority of the votes he's seeking to have thrown out — failed to include a photo ID with their overseas ballots or were never residents of North Carolina. In some instances, voters with incomplete registration neglected to or were never asked to provide driver's license information or the last four digits of their social security numbers. Discarding those thousands of votes would push Griffin into the lead.
Griffin filed another brief in the case Tuesday, highlighting the photo ID protest over the other two claims in his petition. That challenge affects just 5,509 overseas ballots that he said lacked necessary photo identification. The court, he said, could just decide the merits of that protest and return the matter to the North Carolina Board of Elections to recount the ballots since it could make the rest of the case moot.
"Judge Griffin anticipates that, if these unlawful ballots are excluded, he will win the election," his lawyer said of the ballots lacking photo IDs.
Action on the other protests of his petition, Griffin added, can be temporarily postponed pending a decision on the photo ID matter.
Democrats say that, whatever the arguments, the intent is to overturn the will of the public.
Cooper called Griffin and Republicans' efforts to have these votes thrown out a "novel and egregious theory" and cautioned voters to take it seriously.
"It's important for you to know that this is just not another step in the recount process. It's not another step in the post-election process. This is not even a run-of-the-mill contested election," Cooper said. "This is a scheme to throw out legal votes en masse by eligible voters who even showed their voter ID to be able to vote."
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison echoed those sentiments, admonishing what he described as Republicans' "rock-bottom maneuver to circumvent the will of North Carolina voters" and evoking with it the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"January 6 was a grave test for our democracy, and we cannot leave the lessons of that day to the annals of history. In an age of disinformation and right-wing extremism, democracy is not something guaranteed to us," Harrison said.
"The ability of Americans to vote — our most sacred right — is now, once again, under attack by Republicans," he added. "The Ground Zero of this fight in early 2025 lies in the great state of North Carolina."
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear Griffin's petition later this month.
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