The Election Day vote count and two subsequent recounts have concluded that a race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court was narrowly won in November by the incumbent Democratic justice.
But a highly unusual legal campaign by the losing Republican candidate to throw out the results on technical grounds may now be headed to that same court, where a Republican majority has the potential to overturn the vote.
A federal district judge ordered that the dispute be sent to North Carolina’s court system on Monday, ruling that the issues were principally matters of state law, not federal. The decision came only days before the State Board of Elections was scheduled to certify that the incumbent justice, Allison Riggs, had beat her Republican opponent, Jefferson Griffin, by 734 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots that were cast.
Lawyers for Justice Riggs and the State Board of Elections quickly appealed the ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of President-elect Donald J. Trump, to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The battle over the November results is but one indicator of the bitter partisan divide on the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-2 majority. The court’s Republican chief justice, Paul Newby, was a prominent supporter of Judge Griffin’s election campaign.
Judge Griffin’s unusual protest does not claim that any voters knowingly voted illegally, or even that they lacked the customary qualifications to cast a ballot, such as proof of identity.
Instead, he says that about 60,000 ballots should be thrown out because those voters originally registered — often years or even decades ago — using a form that erroneously failed to mandate that they provide the last four digits of a driver’s license or a Social Security number.
All of those voters provided proof of identity when they cast ballots in November.
Judge Griffin’s complaint also seeks to throw out the ballots of some North Carolinians who live overseas because they did not submit photo IDs as a new state law requires, although a separate law governing military and overseas voting does not include that requirement for overseas voters. The complaint also seeks to disqualify votes by children of overseas voters who have never resided in the state, although state law grants them the right.
