Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to throw out 65,000 votes finally gets a court hearing on the merits

There have been several previous rulings in separate courts, both state and federal, but those dealt with procedural issues. On Friday, a state judge will hear the first arguments about the fundamental questions at hand. 

For the first time since Jefferson Griffin asked North Carolina courts to overturn his 2024 loss in the North Carolina Supreme Court race, a state court on Friday will consider the actual merits of the case.

There have been several previous rulings in three separate court systems, both state and federal, but those dealt with procedural issues — what court should hear the case and when. 

Three counts of the votes last November showed that Democratic Justice Allison Riggs won the election by 734 votes, but now the Wake County Superior Court is set to hear oral arguments about whether to force state election officials to throw out more than 65,000 ballots so that Griffin can win instead.  

The bulk of those ballots are from voters whose voter registrations may be missing some information in a state database, but who have been voting for years with no problems and who had to show a valid ID in order to actually cast their vote in 2024. 

And more than 5,500 of the contested ballots are from North Carolina members of the military —  and their families — who were serving overseas at the time of the election and submitted absentee ballots. Nearly a year and a half before the election, the North Carolina Board of Elections (BOE) ruled under their interpretation of state law that these voters did not have to show a copy of their ID, a plan signed off on by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. 

Griffin says the BOE should have required them to show IDs, since voters who vote in person have to show IDs, according to state law. 

Since the BOE did not do this, Griffin argues, all those votes should not have been counted, and now the courts should force election officials to remove them from the count. 

Griffin, however, did not raise any concerns about this plan, 16 months in the making, until after the votes were counted — three times — and showed him losing. 

A tangled path 

Thousands of pages of legal briefs and court rulings have already been written about this case, but zero of them offer a final word on whether courts can throw out the ballots of voters who followed all the rules so that a losing candidate can win. 

The case started in the state court system, where by law it should have first gone to Wake County Superior Court, but Griffin asked the state Supreme Court — the very court he’s hoping to throw out votes to join — to skip that step and decide it all by themselves. Almost as soon as Griffin filed this request, the state board of elections asked that the case be removed to federal court, a process that is automatic once requested, and it fell on the desk of a federal judge who rejected a similar move in a separate case before the election. 

The judge, who was appointed by Donald Trump, eventually ruled that the case hinged on state law and so it should indeed be settled in state courts. Riggs and the BOE appealed that ruling, however, and suddenly the train split into two cars running on parallel tracks, the original case in state courts and the appeal in federal courts.

But before the federal court could hear the appeal, the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected Griffin’s specific request — not his overall ask to throw out the votes, just his request that the case be fast-tracked past the lower court that was meant to hear it first.

RELATED: Conservative voices join the outcry against Jefferson Griffin’s effort to overturn his election loss

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the case could stay in state court for now, but that if federal constitutional issues remained after the case ran its course in the states, they could take it back.

Each of the rulings so far have been about the proper process. The Wake County Superior Court judge will be the first to consider the actual legal questions Griffin is asking.

In a statement soon after the ruling, Riggs said she was happy to know the federal courts would be watching developments, but it was time to end this thing once and for all.

“I am reassured to know that federal courts stand ready to hear arguments about the rights of voters under federal law and the US Constitution,” Riggs said in an emailed statement. “However, the 2024 General Election was three months ago, today, and Judge Griffin continues to waste taxpayer resources and thwart the will of North Carolina voters with these baseless lawsuits.”

Griffin has not commented publicly about the case and has deleted his social media accounts. Cardinal & Pine reached out to him in early December for comment for an earlier article on the case. He replied that to comment would violate judicial ethics prohibiting judges from publicly discussing cases they are ruling on or could rule on. That ethical statute, however, does not apply to cases they are plaintiffs in.

‘An erosion of our basic democratic principles’

The Campaign Legal Center, a national nonprofit organization of voting rights lawyers and legal experts, is one of several groups to file amicus briefs in the state case objecting to Griffin’s efforts.

In their brief, which focuses on the effect a court ruling in Griffin’s favor would have on military voters, CLC says that Griffin’s focus is not on ensuring every legal vote is counted, as he argues, but rather on “engineering his own electoral victory.”

The issue is one of “fundamental fairness,” and a bedrock of election law, process, and ethics, Danielle Lang, CLC’s senior director for voting rights, said in a phone interview on Thursday. 

“You can argue about why the rules maybe should be changed in the future, but we don’t change the rules after the game,” Lang said. 

“In our brief, you’ll see that we point to a number of cases that specifically identify this principle: Changing the rules on voters after the fact is unlawful and it would be a violation of federal due process.”

She continued: “It would be fundamentally unfair and in fact an erosion of our basic democratic principles to reject those voters.”