Dem
47
GOP
53
Republican Jefferson Griffin narrowly lost a state Supreme Court decision in North Carolina in Nov. 2024, and ever since then he has been trying to use the courts to do what the voters refused to do: put him on the state Supreme Court. The case is testing the limits of changing the rules after the election is over, all the votes have been counted, and the winner has been seated.
Back in November, Justice Allison Riggs beat Griffin by 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast across North Carolina. She was sworn in and seated on the court. Griffin didn't like the results and has been fighting it ever since. His argument is that 65,000 people who cast ballots were legally ineligible to vote because they didn't provide proof of identity when they registered. Until last year, the registration form didn't even ask for ID information, like a driver's license number or partial Social Security number. However, in court filings it is clear that many of them did provide proof, but due to administrative errors, name changes after marriages, and other reasons, they didn't appear in the database. Griffin admits that the voters did nothing wrong and followed all the laws, but since there was no proof of identity in the database, he argued that their votes should be discarded.
The state board of elections threw out Griffin's case but now an appeals court ruled for him, 2-1, along party lines. The panel also ruled that the voters should get 15 days to "cure" their defective registrations. Key issues are how the voters would be notified, how they would be allowed to cure their registrations, and what about overseas voters. The majority also wrote that people who never lived in North Carolina should not be allowed to vote there. This mostly deals with the children of military parents who are stationed abroad and the children of missionaries. Federal law mandates that U.S. citizens who never lived in the U.S. may vote in the state their parents last lived in for federal elections, but is silent on state elections.
The case will be appealed to the state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority. If Riggs recuses herself, it will then be 5-1. It may well yet end up in the federal courts, possibly even up to the Supreme Court.
The Democrat on the panel strongly dissented, writing that changing the rules after an election and only for one race was "directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution."
If it is ultimately decided to retroactively invalidate some votes, it is not clear how those ballots would be located and uncounted. Ballots generally have a unique number on them for security purposes (to detect fake ballots stuffed into the ballot box), but uncounting ballots would require matching invalid voters with invalid ballots somehow. Most of the contested ballots come from heavily Democratic areas, but surely the courts would not allow statistical methods to be used rather than counting actual votes. (V)