A Republican judge in North Carolina who lost a race for a seat on the state Supreme Court is seeking to overturn his defeat by throwing out 60,000 ballots cast in the election—mostly from Black and Democratic voters, according to a report published Tuesday in the Charlotte Observer.
The judge, Jefferson Griffin, lost to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in November. A recount affirmed Riggs’ victory.
But Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections seeking to toss 60,000 ballots cast in the race, claiming those votes came from voters who did not list Social Security or driver's license numbers on their voter registration forms.
The North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee made the same claim in the fall to try to purge 225,000 voters from the rolls in the state. But both the State Board of Elections and a federal judge ruled against the GOP in that case.
The North Carolina Democratic Party held a news conference Tuesday morning in which they called on Griffin to drop his challenge and concede.
Riggs wrote a brief to the State Board of Elections slamming Griffin’s effort to toss out tens of thousands of ballots in an effort to steal an election he lost:
Having failed to win over the voters, Judge Griffin now pleads his case here. He asks the Board to change the voting rules, decide that tens of thousands of voters failed to satisfy those changed rules, and then throw out their votes for failure to anticipate the new rules. While that request is legally and constitutionally improper, it is wrong on an even more basic level—one familiar in every North Carolina schoolyard. Whether playing a board game, competing in a sport, or running for office, the runner-up cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by asking for a redo under a different set of rules. Yet that is what Judge Griffin is trying to do here.
The sitting justice also sat for an interview with Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias where she criticized Griffin’s push, saying that Griffin was even challenging the validity of Riggs’ own parents’ votes.
“My dad is a 30-year military veteran who registered to vote in person using his military ID,” Riggs said. “It’s not that it’s my parents, it’s that I obviously have their stories to explain how problematic this is. We should not be weaponizing the systems … to avoid conceding in an election you lose.”
The North Carolina Democratic Party also filed a federal lawsuit, arguing that Griffin's challenge violates the National Voter Registration Act.
“By endeavoring to throw away the already-cast votes of large swaths of voters based on generic legal challenges, the Protests, in essence, call for retroactive post-election voter-roll maintenance,” the lawsuit says.
This is the latest attempt by North Carolina Republicans to steal power from duly elected Democrats.
In November, the GOP-controlled state legislature worked in secret to pass a bill that took power away from Democratic Gov.-elect Josh Stein, as well as state Attorney General-elect Jeff Jackson.
As Daily Kos reported last week:
The bill removes the governor’s ability to appoint members of the State Board of Elections and requires that a governor fill judicial vacancies with judges recommended by the party the outgoing judge belonged to. It also takes control of the state Utilities Commission from the governor and tries to hamstring the state attorney general from pursuing cases that are “contrary to or inconsistent with the position of the General Assembly.” Additionally, it blocks incoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green from appealing decisions from the N.C. Charter School Review Board.
Current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, but Republicans—who currently have a gerrymandered supermajority in the legislature—overrode his veto.
Ultimately, Democrats say they are worried that Republicans will steal this seat, and are hoping the 5-2 Republican majority on the state Supreme Court doesn’t aid the GOP in its quest.
"To throw out 60,000 lawful votes to overturn Justice Allison Riggs’ victory is a brazen and callous attack on the rule of law and North Carolinians’ right to vote, but it isn’t surprising,” DNC Executive Director Sam Cornale said in a statement. “From trying to take power away from the newly-elected Democratic governor to threatening to overturn the will of the voters, Republicans will stop at nothing in their quest for power. The Democratic National Committee stands with our partners in North Carolina as they fight to ensure North Carolinians keep the government they elected.”
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