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A federal judge on Monday launched the battle for an election to fill the seat North Carolina Supreme Court back to the state supreme court.
Then, North Carolina’s highest court on Tuesday blocked certification of the election results between Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs and GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin.
Griffin lost the general electionsand two counts later, a statewide machine count and a partial count of ballots from randomly selected early voting locations and Election Day precincts in each county, still showed Riggs in the lead, according to WUNC. The results show the Democrat ahead by just 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast, but Riggs says 60,000 votes cast should be invalidated.
The eventual winner gets an eight-year term on a Supreme Court where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans.
Most of the ballots Griffin questions came from voters whose records did not have a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, which a state law requires to be looked up in registration requests since 2004. Before the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002, voter registration forms did not clearly require people to list their last four digits of your Social Security number or your driver’s number. license number
The 81-year-old GOP lawmaker receives medical attention after the fall in the US capital
Still it is it is still legal to vote in cases where the last four Social Security numbers or the digits of a person’s driver’s license cannot be validated. People can still present a HAVA document, such as a utility bill, and the state election administration office must assign that person a special identification number to register to vote, according to WUNC .
North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin and North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Allison Riggs. (North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts via AP)
Other large categories of votes that Griffin is challenging were cast by foreign voters who have never lived in the US but whose parents were considered North Carolina residents and by military or foreign voters who did not provide copies of photo ID with their ballots. Consistent with federal law, state administrative code says foreign voters are exempt from that requirement, WUNC reported.
Attorneys for Griffin, who is an intermediate-level state Court of Appeals judge, initially asked the state Supreme Court to step in three weeks ago.
But the election board quickly moved the matter to federal court, saying Griffin’s appeals involved issues of federal voting and voting rights laws.
Griffin disagreed, and so did U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who sent the case back to the state Supreme Court on Monday.
Myers, a candidate for the bench for Donald Trump, wrote that Griffin’s protests raised “unsettled questions of state law” and had tenuous connections to federal law.
North Carolina Democratic State Chairman Anderson Clayton, left, speaks at a news conference about the pending election for a state Supreme Court seat Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024 at Capitol Square in Raleigh, North Carolina (AP Photo/Gary D. Robertson)
Hours later, Griffin’s attorneys asked the state Supreme Court for a temporary stay, which the court granted.
“Absent a stay from the federal court, this matter should be addressed expeditiously because it involves the certification of an election,” Tuesday’s order said.
The order said that Riggs recused himself from the matter and that Associate Justice Anita Earls, the court’s other Democrat, opposed the stay in part because “the public interest requires that the Court not interfere in the normal course of democratic processes as established by statute and state constitution”.
Attorneys for the State Board of Elections and Riggs quickly filed notices of appeal of Myers’ decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. The state board on Tuesday asked the appeals court to order Myers to remove the litigation from the state Supreme Court and block his return to state court while the matter is appealed.
Barring the intervention of federal appeals judges, the Republican-majority state’s Supreme Court would essentially be asked to decide the winner of one of its own seats.
Voters make choices at their polling booths inside an early voting site on October 17, 2024 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, following Hurricane Helene. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
The state Board of Elections dismissed Griffin’s written protests challenging the ballots last month. This started a schedule in which the board would issue a certificate confirming Riggs’ election this Friday, ending the litigation unless a court intervenes. Tuesday’s order halts that certification and tells Griffin and the board to submit legal briefs to the justices within the next two weeks.
Riggs’ Democratic allies have accused Griffin and the state GOP of trying to overturn legitimate election results.
Riggs “deserves his certificate of election and we are only in this position because Jefferson Griffin refuses to accept the will of the people,” state Democratic Party Chairman Anderson Clayton said in a news release.
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The state board of elections that dismissed Griffin’s protests is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans.
The Supreme Court in the nation’s ninth-largest state has been a partisan flashpoint in recent years in court battles involving redistricting, voter photo identification and other voting rights.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
