‘I feel powerless’: The NC Supreme Court race could hinge on whether thousands of likely legal ballots are thrown out

A recount has confirmed Democratic Justice Allison Riggs’ victory over Republican Jefferson Griffin, but Griffin has filed official challenges against 60,000 ballots, including those of Riggs’ parents and a prominent doctor.

UPDATE: This post has been changed to add the news that North Carolina Democrats have filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the 60,000 votes from being discounted.

Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court, lost to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs in two separate counts of the votes. He’ll likely soon lose a third. 

The original count gave Riggs, a Democrat, a 734-vote margin of victory, and a statewide machine recount gave her the same margin this week. A more limited hand recount is now underway, but is not expected to significantly change the total.

While that will be the final recount, however, it will not be the end of the saga.

Griffin has demanded that election officials throw out 60,000 votes based on vague and legally dubious accusations of fraud or impropriety. 

Among the ballots Griffin wants to toss? 

• Riggs’ parents. 
• The legislative assistant for NC Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democrat.
  
• Dr. Amy Bryant, the Durham physician who filed a lawsuit last year against North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban.

All of them were legally registered and eligible voters when they cast their ballot. 

The bulk of the 60,000 challenges are of voters whose driver’s license or partial social security number information is not included in a state registration database. Federal law requires this info to be included, and a similar lawsuit filed by Republicans before voting began suggests that noncitizens could be hiding among the registrations missing the info. But that legal claim conflates evidence with mere accusation, and has already been rejected by a judge in a separate case. 

The reality is that there are many reasons that those details could be missing from the database, and the vast majority of voters disenfranchised by such a culling would be lawfully registered voters.

“North Carolinian voters have spoken, and their votes have been counted and recounted,” Riggs said in an emailed statement. 

It was now time for Griffin to concede, Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager said.

“Losing candidates must respect the will of voters and not needlessly waste state resources,” Owen said.

But if Griffin takes these challenges all the way to the state supreme court, the very one he’s trying to join, it’s possible the Republican majority on the court votes to overrule the choice of the voters.

A rejected precedent

State and national Republicans filed a lawsuit in September based on the same claim in Griffins’s challenges, seeking to remove 225,000 North Carolinians from the voter rolls whose registration lacked the information.

The lawsuit argued that the lack of driver’s license or social security information could mean hundreds of thousands of noncitizens had been allowed to register.

But there are entirely valid reasons for the information to be missing that aren’t nefarious, Patrick Gannon, the spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a statement soon after the suit was filed. 

“If a voter does not have a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number populated in the voter registration database, that does not necessarily mean that they were allowed to register improperly,” Gannon said in an emailed statement in September. 

Sometimes missing database information is because of discrepancies between DMV and Social Security databases, and those discrepancies can be as simple as the difference between a maiden and married name.

Chief District Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, rejected the Republicans’ claims in the September lawsuit, writing in his ruling that if he removed these voters, it would essentially give judges and private citizens the power to unilaterally cancel voter registration based on a mere accusation. 

‘I’m not going to stand for not having my vote counted’

Dr. Bryant is already well known in North Carolina.

She sued the General Assembly in 2023 over restrictions lawmakers placed on the abortion medication mifepristone, part of the most common form of abortion care in the United States. And when Republican legislators passed a 12-week abortion ban that expanded on those restrictions, she amended the lawsuit to include the ban.

A federal judge ruled in her favor on several parts of her suit. 

She’s confident her record as a thorn in Republicans’ sides is unrelated to the attempt to invalidate her vote, but was shocked when she got a notice from the North Carolina Republican Party that her vote had been challenged.

“I was the last person I expected to see on that list,” Bryant told Cardinal & Pine on Thursday.

“I’m feeling a huge range of emotions. I’m feeling angry. I’m feeling frustrated. I’m feeling outraged. I’m feeling just undermined. I feel powerless,” she said.

“It’s an extremely enraging feeling and infuriating place to imagine that my vote could potentially not count when I am an upstanding citizen who votes in almost every election, who does everything I can to stay informed and to try to participate in our democracy and be an active participant in our state and our community.”

She continued: ”I’m not going to stand for not having my vote counted … this is just hugely unfair.”

Bryant registered to vote in North Carolina soon after moving to Durham in June of 2011. She did it at the DMV when she changed her address on her license. 

She’s voted in every election since then, the State Board of Election database confirms. 

She’s always been on the voter list. She was always given a standard ballot. She never had a problem, she said. 

This was the first presidential election requiring a voter ID, and when she voted in the early voting period, the election officials asked for it.

She showed it, and it was accepted.  

‘Zero details’

The notice came like an unsolicited ad.

It used vague language, and included a QR code.

It was addressed to “Amy Bryant or current resident.”

“I mean, It looks literally like a piece of junk mail,” Bryant said.

Most people who got it probably threw it away thinking it was just another effort to sell them something, Bryant said.

“***NOTICE*** Your vote may be affected by one or more protests,” it said. 

If she hadn’t already heard mention of the challenges in the media, she said, she probably would have thrown it away without a closer look, too. 

The QR code directed her to a site run by the North Carolina Republican Party, containing links to each candidate’s challenges organized by county.

She eventually found her name in the incomplete voter registration file.

“There were zero details,” Bryant said.

“I don’t know what they’re protesting.”

The county boards of election will handle the protests about felony voting and voters who have died, but the state board will hear challenges about issues of legality, like the incomplete registrations. The state board has already rejected the idea in the previous lawsuit. 

When Bryant called the state board for further guidance, they told her that eventually there would be a hearing that she could attend, but said that for now, she should contact the Griffin campaign, which should give more details about the challenge.

She did. A week ago. She didn’t hear back.

The notice Dr. Amy Bryant received saying her vote had been challenged, one of 60,000 ballots contested by Jefferson Griffin in his losing bid to join the state Supreme Court. Bryant has been legally registered to vote in North Carolina since moving to Durham in 2011. (Courtesy of Dr. Amy Bryant.)

‘I don’t know what to do’

Bryant knows how to save her patients’ lives in an emergency, can lead them through all the challenges and complications of pregnancy, and can navigate the complexities of the healthcare system. 

But she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do to make sure her vote counts. 

“I haven’t heard anything else about the [board of elections] hearing,” Bryant said, “when it is where it is, how I’m supposed to find it out.”

She added: “And I don’t know if I can go, because I work full time.”

Cardinal & Pine on Thursday afternoon sent an email to Gannon, the BOE spokesman, seeking clarification on what voters should do if their vote is contested. He responded on Friday morning saying he would soon answer our questions and provide more information. We will update this post when he does. 

“I am worried because I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know whether this is going to somehow jeopardize my vote. I am also really worried  about the 59,999 other people who may not know that this is happening.”

How to check if your vote is being protested and what to do about it

The State Board of Election has not scheduled the hearing on the legal challenges and has rejected the missing information previously, but the North Carolina Democratic Party on Friday filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block them from ruling in Griffin’s favor. 

But if you are wondering if your vote is being challenged, you can find the full list of contested ballots on the Board of Election website. You just have to do a few rounds of clicking. First, go here, the repository for all challenge file pdfs.

They are arranged according to a set file name: county – challenger – reason. And the key word is “incomplete registration.”

So if you are in Wake County, for example, look for the file that says “Wake-Griffin- Incomplete Registration.”

Open it and you’ll see all legal forms at the beginning. Scroll to the end and you’ll find the collection of names. Then do a “ctrl-F” and search for your name.

Each challenge will be investigated, either by the county board or state board, depending on the specifics, but election officials say that if you are on the list, you can reach out to Griffin or Riggs’ team at [email protected] and [email protected].

Riggs’ team responded, Bryant said. She’s still waiting to hear from Griffin.

“My plan is to reach out to the [Griffin] campaign again to make sure they didn’t just miss my email. But after that, I don’t know. I’m going to try to seek help from whatever legal help I can get, because this is outrageous and I want my vote to count. This is not fair.”