Nearly five months after the 2024 elections, a legal fight is raging in battleground North Carolina in an unsettled and contentious state Supreme Court race.
At stake – an eight-year term on the highest court in the nation’s ninth most populous state.
After two recounts, incumbent Allison Riggs, a Democrat, leads Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast.
Griffin, who sits on North Carolina’s Court of Appeals, has been arguing for months that more than 65,000 ballots from the election should be discarded because they came from what he claims are ineligible voters.
He says the North Carolina Board of Elections last December improperly dismissed his formal protests and certified the ballots following the recounts. The removal of those ballots from the vote tally could potentially flip the election to Griffin.
A trial judge upheld the Board of Elections’ action last month, but the case is now in the hands of a three-judge panel on the state’s appeals court, which listened to arguments on Friday.
Among the votes being contested are ballots cast by those with registration records that lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Also being challenged are military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.
Griffin’s lawyers argue that counting the contested ballots violates state laws or the state constitution, and the state elections board failed to follow them. However, lawyers for Riggs, as well as the Board of Elections, say the ballots in question were cast lawfully based on longstanding rules and can’t be altered after the fact.
On Tuesday, as the state awaits the appeals court ruling in the case, a new ad charges that Griffin is “specifically targeting thousands of military voters.”
The spot is by a group called Justice Project Action, which describes itself as a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to upholding the rule of law and the independence of American courts.”
The group says their ad, which includes four self-identified military veterans raising “a lot of concerns about military votes being thrown out,” will run on the Fox News Channel in North Carolina.
The release of the spot comes a week after more than 200 former judges and legal experts signed a letter urging Griffin to drop his lawsuit. Among those joining the effort were former general counsels for the North Carolina Republican Party and former GOP Gov. Jim McCrory.
It is likely that, regardless of how the appeals court judges rule, the case appears headed for the state Supreme Court.
AP reporting is included in this report.
