Jefferson Griffin has a numbers problem

Looks like Allison Riggs won’t have her seat stolen

It has been a game of legal ping pong since sore loser Jefferson Griffin challenged the results of his narrow loss last year in the state Supreme Court race to incumbent Democratic judge Allison Riggs by 737 votes. It can be very hard to keep track of what’s going on.

To boil it down, the NC Supreme Court last Friday partly overruled the NC Court of Appeals panel decision. The 4-2 decision elected to keep the 60,000 votes but leaving in Griffin’s challenge of up to 5,000 military and overseas voters (and wrongly tossing out 260 “never resident” votes), with the caveat that the cure period be 30 days after the final court ruling.

After some tireless reporting by local freelance journalist Bryan Anderson on his Substack and Bluesky accounts, the NCBSE issued a response to the federal court last night that they will count the 260 wrongly labeled “never residents” and allow them due process. (They will also have a chance to cure their ballots within that same time frame.)

More importantly, they noted that Griffin’s team only managed to timely challenge the overseas and military voters from Guilford County— only 1,409 voters need to cure their ballots. So even if the federal courts rule in favor of Griffin going forward and if none of the challenged voters use the 30 day cure period (unlikely), he still loses.

While the court rulings haven’t come in (and will play out over several more months), this is a big relief.