‘We shouldn’t be here’ : Effort to throw out votes in NC Supreme Court race threatens election integrity, Riggs says

Justice Allison Riggs sat down with Cardinal & Pine this week to discuss her opponent’s challenges to 60,000 votes. On Wednesday, Republican Jefferson Griffin asked the NC Supreme Court to overrule the will of the voters.

Weeks after voting for their daughter in the North Carolina Supreme Court election, Christine and Jack Riggs agreed to watch her dog for the day. 

It had been a long few weeks, and Justice Allison Riggs still had a lot to do.

“My dog sometimes hangs out with my parents during the day,” Riggs said. “My mom loves dogs.”

When Allison Riggs arrived to pick up the dog that evening, they all sat around the kitchen table talking. A stack of mail sat on the table too.

“I got this weird mailer,” Christine Riggs told her daughter.

And that, Allison Riggs told Cardinal & Pine on Monday, is how she found out that her parents’ ballots were among the more than 60,000 votes her opponent in the November election is seeking to throw out so that he can overturn Riggs’ 734-vote victory.

Republican Jefferson Griffin, a NC appellate court judge, filed challenges with the North Carolina Board of Elections (BOE)  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, vast majority of these contested voters are likely eligible voters, and there are many 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, like Riggs’ parents, have been voting without issue for years. 

“We were just sitting with my parents around their kitchen table in Durham,” Allison Riggs said. “My mom was like, ‘I don’t know what this is, is my vote not going to count?’”

Griffin asks NC Supreme Court to help him win

Riggs won by 734 votes, a victory confirmed by two recounts. Earlier this month, the Board of Elections dismissed Griffin’s challenge in a 3-2 vote along party lines

On Wednesday, Griffin appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the very court he’s seeking to join, to throw out the 60,000 votes. 

In the 87-page filing, Griffin repeated the claim that these voters were improperly registered and that their ballots should not have been counted.

Griffin asked the court to first prevent the Board of Elections from certifying the election as it heard the case, then to force the board to discard the 60,000 ballots and recount the votes.

Left unaddressed is the chaos such a decision would bring.

Throwing out  60,000 votes is enough to potentially change the outcome of other races, and if these voters become ineligible, what happens to  all the other elections they voted in?

“Does that mean [their] vote for president didn’t count? Did it mean [their] other votes?” Riggs said. “There’s something amiss, generally speaking, with some of the cleanup arguments being offered in person.” 

Griffin is not seeking a process that looks at each voter, he’s seeking a mass purge after the ballots have already been counted, and to throw out all these votes based on a seeming paperwork issue would represent unprecedented interference in an election.

“The 60,000 people whose ballots my opponent and others want to have tossed, those are real people with real stories,” Justice Riggs said. 

Riggs is a former voting rights advocate who argued against the state’s gerrymandered maps before the US Supreme Court, twice.

But this is a completely different fight.

It’s one thing for a state to pass restrictive voting laws that will affect future elections, it’s another to try and throw out votes that have already been cast.

“It’s changing the rules of the game after the game has ended,” Riggs said. “If you change an election rule going forward, at least in theory, voters will have some notice and be able to comply.”

These voters, who did everything they were supposed to do, will have no recourse. 

“That doesn’t comport with any just elementary level notion of fairness,” she said. “This is not something that should be normalized or accepted.”

‘There is nothing wrong with these voters’

The postcard Riggs’ mother received was from the North Carolina Republican Party. It was addressed to “Christine Riggs or Current Resident,” and said “your vote may be affected by one or more challenges.” 

Jack Riggs, Allison’s father, is on the challenge list, but he did not get a postcard.

The card also contained a bar code, which Jack Riggs told his wife not to scan in case it contained a computer virus.

“To be clear, neither of them really understands what a QR code is,” Justice Riggs said.

The Board of Elections ruled these cards failed to meet the requirement that voters whose ballots are being challenged receive proper notice. 

Riggs helped her parents navigate the card’s instructions, which sent them to a website with lots of files, where, because she knew where to look, she found their names among the challenges.

Riggs’ parents have a daughter who’s a sitting Supreme Court Justice who could explain the process to them. Most voters, it’s fair to say, do not.

“Imagine someone who doesn’t have access to those kinds of resources,” Riggs said. “My parents are the exception, not the rule.”

Jack Riggs, who served in the US Navy Reserves from 1980 to 2010, used his military ID to register to vote in Durham in 2020. 

“He brought a bunch of documents with him [when he registered],” Riggs said, including a current utility bill, which the North Carolina Board of Elections accepts to prove residency.

“My dad uses his military ID for everything, like to get in anywhere, to get on the airplane,” Riggs said.

“He’s proud of his service, as he should be. And he just leads with that. That’s who he is. And I think it’s common of a lot of people who’ve served a long time,” she said.

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

Riggs’ parents voted in the 2020 primary elections and in nearly every election since, (Jack Riggs did not vote in the 2022 primary or the 2023 municipal elections.) Each time, they voted in person during the early voting period. Each ballot was accepted, each vote counted. 

The BOE directed anyone getting the GOP postcards to contact the Griffin and Riggs campaigns for more information.  Riggs had little information to provide the many voters who reached out to her, but told her team to respond to as many as they could.

She wanted to make sure the voters, whether they voted for her or not, felt heard rather than alone in their anxiety about potentially having their votes discounted.

“We just said, ‘look, Justice Riggs’ parents are going through this. To our knowledge, there’s no cure process. There’s nothing you did wrong. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing to fix,” Riggs said.

“There is nothing wrong with these voters.”

‘Changing the rules of the game after the game has ended.’

After the BOE rejected Griffin’s challenges, the next step was supposed to be an appeal to Wake County Superior Court, but Griffin skipped that step and brought it straight to the state’s highest court. 

But the case was only in the state Supreme Court’s hands briefly. The Board of Elections, a defendant in Griffin’s filing, issued a petition on Thursday to move the case to federal court, an automatic process. The case has been assigned to Chief District Judge Richard Myers, a Trump-appointed judge who rejected an earlier, pre-election effort from Republicans to throw 225,000 voters off the rolls for similar reasons.

The case could take months to resolve. 

“I’m prepared, mentally, for this not to resolve any time soon,” Riggs said on Monday. “Be prepared for the worst and then be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t come to that,” she said, but “I think anything is possible.” 

Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the conservative John Locke Foundation, told Carolina Public Press that a judge would be unlikely to agree to invalidate a vote, much less 60,000, over registration issues caused by “administrative failures,” rather than clear voter error.

“Once you fix the problems in this case, you’re going to find out that the majority of those registrations are valid registrations,” Jackson said.

Griffin’s lawyers told the BOE that while they were arguing that these voters were not legally registered, Griffin was not seeking to remove them from the state’s voter rolls.

RELATED: Opinion: Jefferson Griffin proves he isn’t fit to be on NC’s Supreme Court

“None of these protests ask you to remove anybody from any voter rolls,” Phil Strach, one of the lawyers representing Griffin’s challenges, told the board. “It’s simply to correct the vote count.”

But those arguments can’t coexist, Riggs said. 

“I will tell you as a lawyer and as a former election lawyer, it makes no sense. You can’t keep someone on the rolls and then say we’re going to discount their ballot because their registration wasn’t valid,” Riggs said. 

“Do you want us to go back and have all of those 60,000 voters try and contact their county board of elections? In what time frame? What, like, what are they going to have to do and show? Are they going to have to sign something? Like, I didn’t hear practical answers on Wednesday, which, to me, is just indicative that this is not seeking meaningful legal relief,” she said.

“This is,” she added, then paused … “I can’t even figure it out.”

‘I hope you have a Merry Christmas’

Griffin’s filings during the challenge process also contain contradictions, the chief being that they seek to throw out 60,000 likely legal votes while proclaiming, in one news release, a “dedication to upholding the rule of law and protecting the voices of lawful voters.”

“As North Carolinians, we cherish our democratic process. Protecting election integrity is not just an option—it’s our duty,” Griffin said in the release. “These protests are about one fundamental principle: ensuring every legal vote is counted.” 

And every legal vote was counted, election officials said. Multiple times. 

The filings also claim to “highlight specific irregularities and discrepancies,” but in the BOE hearing, Griffin’s lawyers could not name a single voter who could be definitively deemed ineligible.

These arguments are flawed, Riggs said, and the scope of the challenges show a disregard for election integrity, not a defense of it. 

“We shouldn’t even be here,” she said.

“We have to respect election outcomes. We have to respect the will of the voters.”

Cardinal & Pine sent Griffin an email on Wednesday seeking comment for this article.

He responded promptly.

“I don’t comment on pending litigation. That would be a violation of our judicial code of conduct,” he wrote. 

“I hope you have a Merry Christmas.”