The Election Day vote count and two subsequent recounts all concluded that Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent, narrowly won her race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
But on Tuesday that same Supreme Court, which is controlled by Republicans, blocked state officials at least temporarily from certifying that outcome. That set the stage for an extraordinary challenge to the results by the Republican in the contest, Judge Jefferson Griffin of the state Court of Appeals. The court said it would hear the case later this month.
Judge Griffin is asking the court to remove from the results tens of thousands of ballots that were submitted by mail, and to order state officials to provide a correct count. Because mail-ballot voters overwhelmingly favored Justice Riggs, her victory would most likely be overturned.
The case was further evidence, if further evidence were needed, of the bar-fight nature of politics in the state, where the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature just stripped incoming Democratic state officeholders of authority and placed appointments to local election boards under Republican control.
The state Supreme Court also is bitterly divided along partisan lines. Republican justices have pointedly overturned landmark rulings by a previous Democratic majority, and in dissents, Democrats have accused the majority of forsaking law for partisanship. The court’s Republican chief justice, Paul Newby, was a prominent supporter of Judge Griffin’s election campaign.
For their part, Republican justices have blistered past or present Democratic colleagues in their rulings, accusing them, for example, of “judicial sleight of hand” that “thwarted the will of the people.”
That the justices would hear the challenge at all suggested to some experts that they were prepared to ease the path to victory for Judge Griffin. His principal complaint is not that voters deliberately cast illegal ballots, acted improperly or failed to produce identification.
Instead, Judge Griffin said that some 60,000 ballots should be thrown out because those voters unknowingly registered, sometimes years or decades ago, using erroneous forms that did not clearly require applicants to provide the last four digits of a driver’s license or a Social Security number as proof of identity.
“It seemed pretty clear that this was an argument that was dead on arrival,” said Christopher Cooper, an expert on state politics at Western Carolina University. “But the court has shown us otherwise.”
Jeanette Doran, the president of the conservative North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, cautioned against reading too much into the court’s decision.
“I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say this is a forecast of what their decision will be on the merits,” she said. “It’s pressing the pause button” on certification of Justice Riggs’s victory until Judge Griffin’s case can be considered.
The state’s Board of Elections had been scheduled to certify as early as Friday that Justice Riggs had won the election by 734 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots that were cast in the November election.
But Judge Griffin asked the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-to-2 majority, to block that certification until his protest of the election could be heard.
The Supreme Court agreed to that after a federal district judge ruled on Monday that there was no overriding federal issue that would affect the legality of Judge Griffin’s request.
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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. A reversal of Judge Myers’s ruling could delay or block any action by the state Supreme Court in the matter, though there’s no guarantee the federal courts would be a friendlier forum.
The results of North Carolina Supreme Court races have been questioned before, including a Democrat’s protest of a 401-vote loss to a Republican in 2020. But experts say Judge Griffin’s unusual protest is unique in both its scope and audacity.
His argument that some 60,000 ballots should be thrown out because voters’ registration applications lacked identification faces a powerful counterargument: All of those voters provided proof of identity when they cast mail ballots in November. Critics also note that some of the 60,000 voters actually did prove their identity when they registered, but were wrongly classified because of clerical mistakes or unrelated issues, such as changing a surname after marriage.
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, though a separate law governing military and overseas voting does not include that requirement. 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.
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