Coming soon to an election near you
All Jefferson Griffin wants to do is this: he just wants to find 735 votes, which is one more than he needs because he won the state. Got it?
The N.C. Supreme Court is playing a John Roberts hand in overturning the last unsettled election from 2024. The contest is for a seat on their own court. Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs (D) won reelection by 734 votes after multiple recounts. But since Republicans had an overturn strategy in their back pocket for use in case Donald Trump narrowly lost North Carolina, they deployed it instead to ask courts to overturn state Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s (R) loss to Riggs. Citing the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the state constitution, they are challenging the validity of 65,000 early or absentee ballots already counted. The bulk of Griffin’s challenges are based on alleged incomplete voter registrations of voters, some of whom (like most of you) have voted for decades.
This obscure race may seem unimportant to where you live. It is not, because “if Republicans succeed in stealing Riggs’s seat based on HAVA, they will deploy the same tactic wherever and whenever they lose elections going forward.”
Democracy Docket notes:
The three buckets of contested ballots included those cast by overseas voters who did not submit a copy of their photo IDs, voters who never previously resided in North Carolina and individuals whose voter registrations were allegedly incomplete. Opponents of Griffin maintain that the challenges are baseless and emphasize that affected voters complied with all of the state’s voting rules as required.
A Wake County superior court ruled for Riggs in early February, throwing out Griffin’s protest after the state Board of Elections rejected his vote challenge along party lines. And then last week:
The state Supreme Court has rejected a request to speed up the case Judge Jefferson Griffin brought against the state Board of Elections in his attempt to win a seat on the high court.
The State Board and Justice Allison Riggs wanted the case to go right from the trial court, where they won, to the Supreme Court, skipping the Appeals Court. Griffin opposed the move.
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Board and Riggs’ request in a 4-2 vote.
Riggs has recused. The case now goes from the trial court to the Court of Appeals for review.
Here’s what’s really afoot:
Republicans hold a 12-3 seat margin on the Court of Appeals. Judges hear cases in teams of three.
If the Appeals Court rules in Griffin’s favor, and the Supreme Court splits 3-3, the Appeals Court decision will stand. In a previous order, three of the Republican Supreme Court justices indicated they are open to Griffin’s arguments.
If the Supreme Court had split 3-3 after agreeing to take the case directly from the trial court, the trial court’s decision in favor of Riggs and the Board would have stood.
Four Republican justices voted against having the case skip the Appeals Court.
In John Roberts fashion, the Republican justices don’t want their robes soiled by overturning a free and fair statewide election, especially by throwing out thousands of votes from a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliateds. They would draw national condemnation and ignite a firestorm locally. They prefer to let the state Appeals Court do the dirty work. That’s why they rejected the request by the State Board and Riggs to take the case directly. This gives the court conservatives a shot at a 3-3 split on a ruling that lets an Appeals Court decision in Griffin’s favor stand … after taking a Roberts court amount of time to prove how serious their deliberations were. Having the state Supreme Court take the case directly might have been Riggs’s best shot but a Supreme Court nightmare.
If Riggs ultimately loses in state court, she will appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on federal elections and voting rights grounds. (You can help her out here.)
Over half of Griffin’s challenges may be baseless
About those alleged incomplete registrations, Griffin, his attorneys, and consultants allege that the bulk of those 65,000 ballots were from voters “whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number,” reports WUNC. But do they? (emphasis mine)
Griffin’s lawyers have argued that counting the challenged ballots violates state laws or the state constitution. Lawyers for Riggs and the board have said the ballots were cast lawfully and that Griffin failed to comply with formal protest procedures. A board attorney recently said that at least half of the voters that Griffin challenged over driver’s license or Social Security numbers actually did provide one.
That data simply doesn’t appear in the voter database Griffin’s consultants searched.
Allison Riggs
The Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central Universities reached 23 students among the over 700 Duke and roughly 400 Central students whose votes Griffin challenges. They found an even higher percentage:
But research by the Student Voting Rights Lab into the voter registration histories of student voters reveals the absence of negligence on their part. We have thus far located 23 Duke students in the Griffin challenge who either retained copies of their original voter registration forms or who requested copies of them from the Durham County Board of Elections after learning they had been challenged.
Given the fact that all of them are listed as having incomplete voter registrations in North Carolina’s voter registration database, we expected most of them to have left the Social Security number section blank in their voter registration forms. What we discovered, however, was striking and consistent. Of these 23 students, 22 correctly listed the last four digits of their social security numbers. Our research is ongoing. But the compliance rate to the Social Security number requirement – at 96% — is stunning.
The 23rd student had provided her driver’s license number when she first registered. That makes 100% compliance in the small sample.
The lab’s founder and co-director, Gunther Peck, a Duke professor of history, said in a Feb. 17 interview that Griffin is trying to have it both ways. Griffin insists that overseas ballots are invalid for not including a photo ID that was not required for overseas absentees. But he’s also insisting that ballots from early voters whose digital records do not include a driver’s license or Social Security number are invalid even though those voters had to present their photo IDs to vote. Griffin wants them disenfranchised over clerical errors.
Griffin’s challege heavily targets four large North Carolina counties that lean heavily Democratic. For some reason, Peck notes wryly. Plus, his challenge offers challenged voters no remedy for addressing what he claims is a registration deficiency, just disenfranchisement in his race. The state certified the rest months ago.
Since his initial shotgun approach to mass voter disenfranchisement, Griffin has honed in on about 5,500 overseas military voters who did not submit a photo ID with their absentee ballots and roughly 500 eligible voting-age citizens born overseas who never lived in North Carolina. The latter are treated as residents under state and federal law based on where their parents last lived. Griffin wants them disenfranchised as nonresidents nevertheless. Conveniently for Griffin, these are voters not likely to testify in court.
In ruling against Griffin and for the State Board and Riggs regarding “Incomplete Voter Registrations,” the “Never Resident” voters, and the “Lack of Photo Identification for Overeas Voters,” the Wake County judges ruled in each category that “The Court concludes as a matter of law that the Board’s decision was not in violation of constitutional provisions, was not in excess of statutory authority or jurisdiction of the agency, was made upon lawful procedure, and was not affected by other error of law.”
What starts in Atlanta doesn’t stay in Atlanta
This scheme is coming soon to an election near you. Even if the Republican attempt to steal this North Carolina state supreme court seat fails, expect to see this tacic reappear in other close red state races.
What matters immediately is which slice(s) of voters the Appeals Court uses to rule for Griffin (if it does) and how many votes that shifts in his direction.
All Judge Griffin wants to do is this: he just wants to find 735 votes, which is one more than he needs because he won the state. Donald Trump premiered that shtick in Atlanta. It didn’t end there.
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