Four of the Republican judges in the Jefferson Griffin case were his de facto running mates in a previous election 

The state court judges will soon decide whether to overrule the will of the voters and hand Griffin an election he lost. Social media posts from 2020 show the judges praising Griffin and feature smiling photos of themselves standing next to him.

Four years before Jefferson Griffin tried to overturn his loss in the 2024 state Supreme Court election, he won a seat on the state appellate court.

In fact, most of North Carolina’s Republican judicial candidates did well in 2020, winning nearly 80% of their contested elections.

That success was in part, because the state Republican Party, as it often does, ran its eight most prominent judicial candidates not just as individual campaigns, but as members of one conservative dream team.

The “right judges,” the party called them.

These eight judges often campaigned together. They retweeted and vouched for each other. They stood smiling side by side in photographs, forming what the Republican Party pitched as political mirror images of one another.

Among Griffin’s teammates in that judicial-political juggernaut? Four of the nine judges who will decide whether to overrule the will of the voters, toss out more than 65,000 valid ballots, and hand Griffin an election he could not win on his own.

A three-judge panel of appellate court judges heard arguments in Griffin’s case on Friday. One of the judges, Fred Gore, was a Griffin partner in the great eight. 

Whatever happens at the appellate level, the case is destined for the North Carolina Supreme Court, where three more of Griffin’s 2020 partners make up a Republican supermajority: Justice Phil Berger Jr., Justice Tamara Barringer, and Chief Justice Paul Newby.

The X profiles of the four judges contain multiple posts over the course of the 2020 campaign, praising Griffin, heralding the 2020 judicial slate, and featuring photos of themselves standing next to him.

Personal connections and X posts, of course, do not predict how a judge will rule or suggest corruption. But the posts of the judges in this case highlight the tricky context in the background: It’s to separate political loyalty from judicial restraint when judges are asked to campaign as partisans and adjudicate as independents.

Griffin could not convince the voters he was the right person for the job, but he’s hoping he can count on his former running mates instead.

‘Thank you Judge Griffin’

Near the start of the campaign season in September of 2019, Barringer, who ultimately won her 2020 election, posted a photo alongside Griffin after an event in Chapel Hill.

“Enjoyed visiting with Judge @JGriffinNC tonight,” she wrote. “Thank you Judge Griffin for your dedicated service to North Carolina.”

In August of 2020, three months before the election, Berger posted a photo of himself next to Gore and Griffin.

“A fun day in Pender County with @JudgeFredGore and @JGriffinNC,” Berger wrote.

Six weeks later, the North Carolina GOP tweeted a photo of Newby, Griffin, and April Wood, another of the great eight.

“@paulmnewby, @JudgeWoodforCOA, and @JGriffinNC attended the 27th Annual God and Country Banquet in New Bern tonight. Lots of excitement about electing Conservative Judges!”

Berger often also directly praised Griffin online or highlighted the full Republican contingent, as did Newby and Gore. 

“Welcome home, Judge,” Berger wrote in July 2020 after Griffin, who is in the North Carolina National Guard, returned from deployment overseas. 

“Thank you for your service.”

Judge Griffin with Tamara Barringer in 2019. The next year, Barringer won her race for the North Carolina Supreme Court.

To some degree, the posts are simply a reflection of what it means when judicial elections are as partisan as any other. And North Carolina Republicans are hardly alone in running their judicial candidates as a package.

State Democrats also partner their judicial candidates, and Justice Allison Riggs, who beat Griffin in 2024 by 734 votes, also campaigned last year with the Democratic candidates for the appeals court, even participating in a joint campaign ad complete with slow motion walks toward the camera. 

Riggs also has a close connection to the other Democrat on the Supreme Court, Justice Anita Earls. Before they joined the court in separate years, they worked together at the Southern Poverty Law Center. While Riggs recused herself from any role in deciding this case, Earls has not.

But other than Donald Trump in 2020, there is no precedent for a candidate seeking to toss out tens of thousands of valid votes after an election, let alone a judicial candidate for a state’s highest court, let alone a judicial candidate asking his friends on that same court to help him do it.

The judges in the great eight do not have the most robust social media profiles. Gore did not keep up with his X account much after the election. Berger and Newby post somewhat regularly, often about sports or praising veterans on federal holidays. After media scrutiny of Griffin’s lawsuit began to intensify, Griffin deleted his account entirely.

But even after their campaigns ended in success, Griffin would show up occasionally on their feeds.

After the election, Gore retweeted a photo of them working together in their new roles. Griffin also appeared on Berger’s feed multiple times.

Griffin has drawn national attention for his attempt to throw out so many valid votes, but the case will also be the biggest test of a state court system whose mission is to “preserve the rights and liberties of all the people.”

Judge Griffin with Justice Paul Newby, far right, and Judge April Wood, another member of the 2020 Republican “Great Eight.”

A quick review of the case

Two recounts of the vote confirmed Riggs’ narrow win over Griffin. Soon after, Griffin filed a lawsuit saying that the North Carolina Board of Elections illegally counted more than 65,000 votes. (Even Griffin’s team concedes that the voters themselves did nothing wrong.) 

The bulk of those ballots are from voters whose voter registrations Griffin says are missing some required information in a state database. Because of that missing data, he says, the registrations were not legal and the votes should not have been counted. But there are lots of valid reasons why that information might be missing, including simple errors. And when a voter gets married and changes their last name, that can trigger a mismatch in the registration system as well. 

Additionally, most of these voters have been voting for years with no problems, many even for decades, including in the election he won in 2020. And they all had to show a valid ID in order to actually cast their vote in 2024. 

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 provide a copy of their Voter ID with their ballots, 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.

Since the BOE did not do this, Griffin argues, these votes should not have been counted.

But Griffin, who is a member of the national guard and has twice voted by overseas absentee ballot when he was deployed, is not contesting all the overseas military voters who voted this way. He is only contesting the overseas military voters who voted this way in a few heavily Democratic counties. 

All 65,000 voters followed the election rules as they were presented to them, and Riggs’ legal team cites all sorts of legal precedent ruling that officials can’t change the rules for an election that has already passed. Griffin’s team says they are not changing the rules. Instead, they claim the BOE did not follow the existing laws and so the applicable ballots should not have been counted.

Last week, more than 200 members of North Carolina’s legal community, including former judges and justices, wrote an open letter to Griffin urging him to concede and warning him that his lawsuit is damaging the state court system, which North Carolinians trust to be fair and impartial.

“Judge Griffin is asking our appellate courts to determine their own membership, a decision in which the judges and justices have strong personal and professional interests,” one of the letter signers, Jim Exum, former Chief Justice of the NC Supreme Court, told Common Cause NC, a voting rights group that helped arrange the letter.

A screenshot of a post featuring Judge Gore and Judge Griffin that Gore retweeted in 2021.

‘Incredible mischief’

While the  judges’ photos with Griffin call attention to the friendly circles they run in and could create the appearance of a potential conflict of interest, they could turn out to mean nothing at all.  

Both Republican and Democratic judges share the core judicial philosophies of their respective parties, and it’s standard in any election to campaign along like-minded candidates. And the outcry over Griffin’s suit has hardly come only from Democrats. There has been substantial pushback from some Republicans to Griffin’s effort.

One Republican justice on the state supreme court, who was not part of Griffin’s 2020 slate, has already broken with the court’s Republican majority. Justice Richard Dietz wrote that while he agreed with some of Griffin’s accusations against the BOE, the court should have not taken up the case at all. It was simply too late for Griffin to raise these issues for this election without striking at the heart of election integrity and voter confidence, Dietz wrote in his dissent.

“Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules – and as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules – invites incredible mischief,” Dietz wrote.

Dietz said that the focus on the voters with potentially incomplete registration information was “almost certainly meritless,” but he agreed with Griffin that the BOE had made significant errors in their interpretation of the laws regarding overseas ballots.

At this stage in the game, however, it doesn’t matter, he wrote.

“These potential legal errors by the Board could have been—and should have been—addressed in litigation long before people went to the polls in November,” he wrote. 

“Because of the chaos that can emerge from repeated court-compelled changes to how we administer elections, at some point the rules governing an election must be locked in.”

Screenshots of Tweets from Justice Phil Berger Jr.