Griffin opposes latest requests from Riggs, elections board in Supreme Court dispute

Republican state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin urges that court not to step back into his election dispute with the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Democrat Allison Riggs. Griffin filed paperwork Friday morning asking the high court to allow a state Appeals Court decision in the case to stand.

Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast last fall in a race for Riggs’ Supreme Court seat. Riggs is an appointed incumbent. Griffin is a state Appeals Court judge.

Griffin challenges more than 65,000 ballots cast in the election. A Jan. 7 state Supreme Court order blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs as the winner.

The state Supreme Court issued a temporary stay in the dispute Monday. Justices ordered Griffin on Thursday to respond to requests from Riggs and the elections board.

The court is considering whether to grant a request from the elections board and Riggs to issue an order called a writ of supersedeas. The order would block the Appeals Court’s April 4 ruling in the case. Riggs and the elections board are also asking the Supreme Court to take the case.

“The pending petitions should all be denied,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote. “Five months ago, Judge Griffin filed election protests that identified straightforward violations of election law by the State Board of Elections. The Court of Appeals conducted a thorough and careful analysis of those clear-cut claims.”

“But given the simple nature of the protests’ merits, this case has primarily presented a remedial question,” the court filing continued. “Since the Board’s misconduct changed the outcome of the race, Judge Griffin asked that the illegal ballots be discounted.”

Riggs and the elections board “opposed any discounting of the illegal ballots, saying it was unfair to the affected voters,” Griffin’s lawyer wrote.

“The Court of Appeals took a middle approach,” the court filing continued. “It ordered a cure process for the two categories of protests for which a cure was possible. This cure process ensures that only legal votes are counted while also defusing Petitioners’ objections.”

“Judge Griffin respects the remedial decision of the Court of Appeals and isn’t challenging it,” his lawyers wrote. “This litigation has drawn on long enough. The cure process, rather than more courthouse battles, is the pathway for restoring integrity in this election. It is now time to bring the litigation to a close and let the cure process run its course.”

If the Supreme Court takes the case, “it should narrowly limit review to the merits of the three protests” Griffin filed in the case.

The requested writ of supersedeas would block a state Appeals Court ruling issued on April 4. In a 2-1 decision, appellate judges ordered the elections board to take steps that would lead to recalculation of the votes in the 2024 state Supreme Court election.

Riggs and the elections board each filed petitions seeking state Supreme Court review of the case.

“For the first time in North Carolina history, a court has ruled that a voter cannot be certain that her vote will count in this State’s elections even if she complies with every statute, rule, and regulation in place at the time of the election,” Riggs’ Supreme Court petition argued. “The decision below threatens mass disenfranchisement of more than 60,000 eligible voters.”

“The right to vote is fundamental and the lifeblood of our democratic system,” Riggs’ lawyers wrote. “Changing the rules by which voters exercise these rights months after an election, at the whim of an individual candidate who argues the rules should be changed in his race only, is contrary to state law and fundamentally unfair. It is also dangerous.”

The State Board of Elections emphasized the case’s importance.

“The significance of this case to the people of North Carolina is self-evident,” according to the board’s Supreme Court petition. “At stake is whether votes cast by more than 60,000 North Carolinians will be counted in the November 2024 general election for a seat as Associate Justice on this Court. As all parties agree, this case is of ‘great public importance.’”

An Appeals Court panel split, 2-1, on Friday in ordering state elections officials to recalculate vote totals in the disputed 2024 state Supreme Court election. The 103-page decision responded to Griffin’s ballot challenges.

The Appeals Court majority reversed a Wake County trial judge who ruled against Griffin.

Judges John Tyson and Fred Gore supported the decision, though neither one is credited as author of the court’s opinion. Tyson and Gore are Republicans. Judge Tobias Hampson, a Democrat, dissented. The panel heard oral arguments in the case on March 21.

“The post-election protest process preserves the fundamental right to vote in free elections ‘on equal terms,’” according to the unsigned majority opinion. “This right is violated when ‘votes are not accurately counted [because] [unlawful] [ ] ballots are included in the election results.’ The inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively “disenfranchises”’ lawful voters.”

Griffin challenged more than 60,000 ballots from voters whose registration records appeared to lack either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. The Appeals Court opinion labels them “Incomplete Voter Registration” voters.

They are “not qualified as eligible voters in the 2024 election,” Tyson and Gore decided.

“Based on precedent from the Supreme Court of North Carolina, this Court could order that those voters are without a remedy to cure their incomplete registrations,” the majority opinion continued. “However, because the Board and the county boards did not comply with their statutory obligations to notify these voters who have ‘provide[d] enough information on the form to enable the county board to identify and contact the voter’ of the information defect in their registrations, we conclude these voters should be allowed a period of fifteen (15) business days after notice to cure their defective registrations.”

Appellate judges would send the case back to a trial judge with instructions for the State Board of Elections. “Upon remand, the Board is instructed to immediately direct the county boards in all one hundred counties to expeditiously identify the challenged ‘Incomplete Voter Registration’ voters and notify said voters of their registration defects, to allow said voters fifteen (15) business days from the mailing of the notice to cure the defect, and upon verification to include in the count of this challenged election the votes of those voters who timely cure their registration defects and to omit from the final count the votes of those voters who fail to timely cure their registration defects.”

Griffin’s second category of challenged ballots involved more than 5,500 overseas voters who provided no photo identification. “[T]heir ballots have not been properly cast,” Tyson and Gore determined. “[T]his Court could order that those voters are without a remedy to cure their failure to comply with the photo ID requirement.”

Yet the General Assembly has labeled the lack of a photo ID with an election ballot a “curable deficiency,” according to the majority.

“Upon remand, the Board is instructed to immediately direct the county boards to expeditiously identify the military and overseas voters challenged under this protest and notify said voters of their failure to abide by the photo ID requirement or equivalent, to allow said voters fifteen (15) business days from the mailing of the notice to cure the defect, and upon verification, to include in the count of this challenged election the votes of those voters who timely cure their failure to abide by the photo ID requirement and to omit from the final count the votes of those voters who fail to timely cure their deficiencies,” Tyson and Gore ordered.

Griffin’s third category of challenged ballots involved 267 voters who never have lived in North Carolina. “[W]e conclude these purported voters are not eligible to vote in North Carolina, non-federal elections, and the votes cast by these purported voters are not to be included in the final count in the 2024 election.”

All of the challenged “Never Residents” votes would be removed from the statewide total.

The majority opinion took up 37 pages, while Hampson’s dissent extended to 66 pages.

“To be clear: on the Record before us, Petitioner has yet to identify a single voter — among the tens of thousands Petitioner challenges in this appeal — who was, in fact, ineligible to vote in the 2024 General Election under the statutes, rules, and regulations in place in November 2024 governing that election,” Hampson wrote. “Every single voter challenged by Petitioner in this appeal, both here and abroad, cast their absentee, early, or overseas ballot by following every instruction they were given to do so. Their ballots were accepted. Their ballots were counted. The results were canvassed.”

“None of these challenged voters was given any reason to believe their vote would not be counted on election day or included in the final tallies,” Hampson continued. “The diligent actions these voters undertook to exercise their sacred fundamental right to vote was, indeed, the same as every other similarly situated voter exercising their voting right in the very same election. Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution.”

Republicans hold a 5-2 majority on the state Supreme Court. With Riggs recused from the case, the GOP majority is 5-1. In two earlier decisions in the case, Republican Justice Richard Dietz dissented from the majority. The court voted 4-2 in those instances.

Court filings have suggested that parties in the case anticipate a possible 3-3 split among Supreme Court justices, which would leave the Appeals Court’s ruling as the final decision in the dispute.

Riggs continues to serve on the state Supreme Court during the legal battle. Griffin continues to serve on the Appeals Court.

The post Griffin opposes latest requests from Riggs, elections board in Supreme Court dispute first appeared on Carolina Journal.