Parties in NC Supreme Court election dispute submit final written arguments

Final written briefs arrived Monday as a federal judge gathered information about North Carolina’s disputed 2024 state Supreme Court election. The judge has indicated plans to issue a decision in the legal battle “as soon as practicable.”

US Chief District Judge Richard Myers set Monday as the deadline for briefing in the dispute that pits Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin against the State Board of Elections and Democrat Allison Riggs. The North Carolina Democratic Party and left-of-center activist groups are taking part in the case through related lawsuits.

Riggs is an appointed incumbent justice. Griffin is a state Appeals Court judge. Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast last fall. Griffin challenged more than 65,000 ballots counted in the final tally. A January order from Riggs’ state Supreme Court colleagues blocked the elections board from declaring Riggs as the winner.

Earlier court rulings allowed most of Griffin’s challenged ballots to remain in the vote count. Yet the state Supreme Court issued an April 11 order that raises questions about at least 1,675 votes and as many as 5,700. The court endorsed a ballot “cure” process that could lead some remaining challenged votes to be thrown out.

Riggs, the elections board, the state Democratic Party, and other outside groups urge Myers to rule that federal law prevents election officials from tossing votes at this stage in the electoral process. Meanwhile, Griffin is calling on Myers to allow the state Supreme Court’s decision to stand.

“Movants cite no case in which a federal court has enjoined a state court-ordered cure process,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote in their latest brief. “The cases they rely on hold that when courts allow the opportunity for voters to cure deficient ballots, there are no due process concerns. So Movants urge the Court to break new ground on novel legal theories unsupported by text or precedent.”

“At the heart of their federal theories is a state-law issue: whether the North Carolina Supreme Court applied new law to a completed election,” Griffin’s brief added. “Movants attack those judgments at every turn, claiming ‘the state court orders changed the rules’ of the election. But the North Carolina courts didn’t understand their orders that way. As any court does when confronting a statute, the courts said what ‘state law’ is and applied those judgments to the controversy before it.”

“To address the equities resulting from applying state law, the courts ordered a mandatory notice-and-cure procedure ten times more generous than normally permitted. Movants ask this Court to reweigh those equities, revising the state-court judgments to be prospective only. This Court should decline that request. No federal law requires States to tolerate unlawful election results by issuing prospective advisory opinions in their election contests,” Griffin’s lawyers added.

Riggs’ lawyers urged Myers not to let the “volume of filings” in the case distract him from the “straightforward questions” he must address.

“Changing the election rules after the votes have been cast and counted is wrong and unconstitutional,” Riggs’ lawyers wrote. “So too is targeting military and overseas voters who happened to register in a Democratic-leaning county.”

“Judge Griffin wants to avoid those common-sense principles of federal law,” the brief continued. “But he must confront them. He cannot overturn his election loss without convincing a court that federal law permits retroactive, selective changes to the voting rules. The North Carolina courts did not decide those federal questions because this Court retained jurisdiction over them. Those questions are now for this Court to decide.”

“This Court should stop this dangerous effort to undermine the will of the people,” Riggs’ lawyers added.

Defendants in the consolidated lawsuits “uniformly agree that discarding ballots cast in reliance on state laws in place before and during last fall’s elections violates federal law — especially when targeted at military and overseas voters in a few strategically selected counties rather than done statewide,” wrote state Democratic Party lawyers.

“All movants agree that the Court should at the very least order that state officials permanently stop any cure or ballot-discard process,” Democrats’ court filing continued.

The state courts’ rulings in the case expanded North Carolina’s voter residency requirements and its voter identification law, Democrats argued.

“Equity and the public interest demand that these changes in state law not apply retroactively,” the Democratic brief argued. “Judge Griffin also implicitly concedes that the cure-and-discard process will confuse voters. He argues that such voter confusion does not matter because the Board confused voters first. That is beside the point, because what matters is whether federal intervention is necessary to end voter confusion now.”

“It is also wrong. The Board simply instructed voters to follow then-current (and widely accepted) state law,” the Democratic Party’s lawyers added.

The state elections board urged a quick decision from Myers. “[W]hether the Court finds that the appropriate vehicle by which to resolve those federal issues is the relief requested by Judge Griffin, Justice Riggs, the State Board, or the intervening and consolidated parties, the end result is the same. The remaining federal issues can and should be resolved promptly with a final judgment by this Court,” the board’s lawyers wrote.

Myers’ orders in the case indicated that he plans no oral arguments. So observers of the nearly six-month legal battle will watch and wait for a written decision.

Griffin challenged more than 65,000 ballots from the November election. The state’s highest court agreed unanimously this month that most of those ballots will count in the final tally. But challenges to as many as 5,700 ballots remain in question. Most of those ballots involve military and overseas voters who provided no photo identification. A smaller number of targeted ballots involve “never residents,” voters who checked a box on a voter form indicating they have not lived in the United States.

An April 11 state Supreme Court order spells out a “cure” process to determine whether the disputed ballots will remain in the final vote count. Myers issued an order the following day that would have allowed the cure process to move forward while he considered the legal arguments. The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 ruling on April 22 that reversed Myers and placed the cure process on hold.

As Myers ponders the case’s legal issues, the North Carolina Court of Appeals could clarify how many ballots could be subjected to the cure process. The elections board has indicated that it plans to address no more than 1,675 ballots, mostly involving overseas voters tied to Guilford County who provided no photo identification.

Griffin is pushing to include roughly 4,000 more overseas voters. He asked the state Appeals Court to issue an order clarifying the numbers. Riggs and the elections board filed paperwork Friday objecting to that request.

Though the dispute is now nearly six months old, state Supreme Court operations have not been affected. Riggs continues to serve on the court and participate in its arguments and decisions. Griffin continues to serve on the Appeals Court.

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