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Losing NC Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin asks the court to overrule the voters and name him the winner

By Michael McElroy

December 19, 2024

Jefferson Griffin, the Republican who lost the NC Supreme Court election, is seeking an unprecedented thing from the court he ran for. He wants them to change the outcome of an election.

On Wednesday, Jefferson Griffin, who lost the NC Supreme Court election by 734 votes, petitioned the court to throw out the ballots of 60,000 North Carolinians so that he would win.

Multiple outlets reported that news Wednesday. Three counts of the votes, including two recounts, confirmed that incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs won the election, but Griffin, a Republican and current appellate court judge, filed challenges with state elections officials last month, arguing that these 60,000 votes should not have been counted in the first place, because the voters’ registrations were missing some required information on a state database.

But the vast majority of these contested voters are likely eligible voters, and there are lots of valid reasons the information might be missing from the database, election officials say.

These voters also had to show their voter ID before voting, and most have been voting without issue for years.

Griffin is not seeking a process that looks at each voter, he’s seeking a mass purge after the ballots have already been counted.

To throw out all these votes based on a paperwork issue would be an unprecedented interference in an election.

The Board of Elections rejected Griffin’s challenge earlier this month, and Griffin is now appealing to the top court in the state, which has a 5-2 Republican majority. Stay tuned to Cardinal & Pine for updates.

Author

  • Michael McElroy

    Michael McElroy is Cardinal & Pine's political correspondent. He is an adjunct instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and a former editor at The New York Times.

CATEGORIES: LOCAL NEWS

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