Heath Clay, a city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., left the voting booth last fall feeling that this was the most secure election he had ever voted in, partly because of a North Carolina law that requires both in-person and mail-in voters to show proof of identity.
Mr. Clay, a registered Republican, had done just that. But then someone told him troubling news: Jefferson Griffin, a Republican candidate for the State Supreme Court, was trying to nullify more than 60,000 votes in his closely contested race, which three vote counts had already shown him to have lost. And Mr. Clay’s name was on the list.
“Anyone who is trying to invalidate my personal vote as fraudulent — that’s a direct attack on the voters,” said Mr. Clay, who voted for Judge Griffin, who now sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “It’s inexcusable to contest these legal ballots. He’s a sore loser. It is what it is, whether it be by one vote, 100 votes or 1,000 votes. We have spoken.”
The State Board of Elections’s final count showsJustice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent in the race, to be the winner, by a margin of 734 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots that were cast. But Judge Griffin, the North Carolina Republican Party and conservative election deniers have embarked on an extraordinary effort to wipe away that result, and throw out tens of thousands of ballots that were submitted by mail or in early voting.
Who those specific voters favored in the election hasn’t been determined yet. But statewide, early in-person votes were evenly split between the two candidates, while mailed ballots heavily favored Justice Riggs, suggesting that if the challenged votes are thrown out, she could well lose the election.
In mid-November, after a final vote count showed Justice Riggs winning, Judge Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections, which has a Democratic majority. Judge Griffin argued that the forms that tens of thousands of voters were given to fill out did not ask for some information that they should have under the law.
The board turned the protest down in a series of votes that went largely along party lines, noting that what were apparently clerical errors on the part of county election officials were not the fault of the voters. Republicans on the board wanted more hearings, but the Democratic members said the idea of disqualifying thousands of votes from people who had otherwise cast legal ballots was anti-democratic. Two recounts in December reaffirmed Justice Riggs’s lead.
Jason Simmons, the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, said in a statement that voters were “ready to finally see this process brought to a conclusion and the laws of our state faithfully followed.”
“Judge Griffin is fighting to ensure election integrity and resolution of these issues in a fair manner,” Mr. Simmons added.
The Supreme Court race was already one of the most bitterly contested in the state. Both parties view the court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, as crucial to upholding or overturning the state’s gerrymandered election districts, which now heavily favor Republicans.
On Tuesday, the State Supreme Court blocked state officials from certifying the outcome of the race. Later this month, pending the outcome of legal battles over whether the issue should be heard in state or federal courts, the North Carolina court could decide, in effect, whether a Democrat or a Republican will hold the seat.
One Republican justice, Richard Dietz, dissented from the other conservative justices’ order to block the certification of the election.
He wrote that permitting post-election litigation that nullifies the vote of people who had already lawfully cast a ballot under the existing rules “invites incredible mischief.”
Justice Trey Allen, another Republican, noted in his opinion that their order “should not be taken to mean that Judge Griffin will ultimately prevail on the merits.”
Judge Riggs has recused herself from the case, leaving six justices to decide the matter. Turning down Judge Griffin’s protest would take the votes of three — presumably two of the five Republicans and the remaining Democratic justice, Anita Earls.
The State Board of Elections and Justice Riggs’s lawyers have asked a federal appeals court to send the case back to federal court, taking it away from the North Carolina court.
Judge Griffin’s protest includes two arguments against counting a few thousand ballots cast by overseas voters that one Republican justice said this week may have merit. But its centerpiece is a claim that some 60,000 voters in the Supreme Court election failed to list a required proof of identity — either the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number — when they originally registered, as long as two decades ago.
Although the omissions stemmed from a mistake in preparing the registration forms, he has argued, it leaves the voters’ eligibility in question, and their ballots should be thrown out unless they provide legitimate numbers within a limited correction period set by the state.
Questions about those omissions had spread in conservative circles for more than a year, and were teed up for use by Republican political strategists well before Judge Griffin’s November loss.
A conservative election integrity advocate, Carol Snow, analyzed state election records in 2023. She complained to the State Board of Elections that December that some 225,000 registrations over the past two decades had incorrectly omitted legally required driver’s license or Social Security numbers.
The state and national Republican Parties made political use of her complaint in a lawsuit filed last summer, which sought to strike inaccurately registered voters from the North Carolina rolls. In an email exchange, Ms. Snow said that party officials asked for her help on the issue, but that the request never led to a collaboration.
That suit was one of a flurry of court actions that the political parties filed before the election, apparently because lawsuits that are filed after the fact — for example, after an election loss — are regularly dismissed if the issue at stake could have been raised earlier.
“The timing of these suits suggests the Republicans were looking at issues they thought were questionable and getting their markers set in case an election turned out like this one,” said Mitch Kokai, the senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh.
In this case, the argument that thousands of voters were illegally registered was ready for use not just by Judge Griffin, but by Donald Trump or any other Republican who might have suffered a close election loss in the state. In fact, three G.O.P. state legislators who narrowly lost their races also protested the results.
State records show that a week after Election Day, a lawyer associated with the state G.O.P. asked state election officials for an updated version of the same database that Ms. Snow had received. A week after that, Judge Griffin and the three state legislators filed their protests with the State Board of Elections, citing registration irregularities.
The roughly 60,000 ballots that Judge Griffin said were cast by wrongly registered voters were far fewer than the 225,000 supposedly faulty registrations that Ms. Snow claimed, largely because they were limited to ballots cast in the November Supreme Court election.
Judge Griffin’s critics say that both the faulty-registration and questionable-ballot figures are inflated — and that even if they were accurate, they would be irrelevant.
Anecdotal evidence, some of it mentioned in court filings, suggests that many voters on the list actually did provide part of a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered.
But for a host of reasons — key-punching mistakes, name changes after a marriage, problems in matching different computer databases — their proof of identity details never appeared in the official voter database at the State Board of Elections, they say.
Experts note that in the November election, voters who requested mail ballots were already required to provide the last four digits of a driver’s license or Social Security number when making the request. And all voters had to provide a photo ID — often, a driver’s license — or sign a form explaining why they lacked one.
The North Carolina Republican Party defended Judge Griffin’s protest in a statement, saying that the old voter registration forms sent out by the State Board of Elections were illegal and that “225,000 individuals failed to provide this federally required information.”
Anne Tindall, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group, said that “you can’t allow people to vote with certain rules in place, and then after the election say, ‘Oops! Now we’re going to throw out your ballot.’” She added that it did not make sense to delegitimize voters’ ballots for only one race, but allow them to stand for other races.
Several voters on the list from Judge Griffin’s case said the protest felt like disenfranchisement.
Jennifer Baddour, 50, of Chapel Hill, said she probably ended up on the list because she filled out a voter registration form that didn’t require a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.
“But that’s not my fault,” Ms. Baddour said. “This feels a little dramatic to say, but this is nothing short of devastating, especially when you see a race that is so close, and we tell kids, ‘Every vote matters. Every vote counts.’”
Ms. Snow, the elections watchdog whose sleuthing underpins Judge Griffin’s protest, remains sharply critical of the State Board of Elections, which she has long accused of sloppy data management and partisan bias.
That said, though, she wrote that Judge Griffin’s call to disenfranchise voters for registration errors seemed a bridge too far.
“Many of these voters are eligible,” she wrote, and election officials should verify that by asking each voter for the identity information that was missing from their registration applications. Throwing out 60,000 ballots regardless of their legitimacy, she wrote, “would be a grave injustice.”
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