Federal judge issues scathing rebuke of Jefferson Griffin’s attempt to steal an election

US District Judge Richard Myers, a Trump appointee, rejected Griffin’s effort in a restrained, thorough ruling. But it was far from gentle.

A federal judge on Monday ordered North Carolina election officials to certify Justice Allison Riggs as the winner of the state supreme court race that, for the last six months, Jefferson Griffin has been trying to steal. 

US District Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by Donald Trump in his first term, ruled that Griffin’s efforts to overturn that loss violated voters’ federal due process and equal protection rights. Myers also overruled previous rulings by the state’s highest courts, which backed at last some of Griffin’s efforts and gave affected voters a deadline to prove their eligibility or have their votes thrown out. 

“The State Board must not proceed with implementation of the North Carolina Court of Appeals and Supreme Court’s orders, and instead must certify the results of the election for Seat 6 based on the tally at the completion of the canvassing period,” Myers wrote. 

Griffin is likely to appeal, but Myers’ ruling is monumental, nonetheless. This case has crawled along for half a year from federal court to state court and back again. It tested the bounds of legal precedent and elementary fairness, prompted marathon protests, and provided a blueprint for future losing candidates to steal future elections.

Griffin eked out enough room through state court rulings to potentially sneak onto the court despite losing the election. The path was always likely to be far rockier in federal court, as long as Judge Myers agreed it was a federal issue.

And he did. The tone of Myers’ ruling is as striking as his conclusion. 

Myers writes in the clear, precise manner familiar to any frequent reader of legal rulings. But while Myers’ ruling is restrained, it’s far from gentle.

He is often cutting in dismissing Griffin’s arguments, flat out rejecting one point with a “Not so” and seeming to mock another with a simple, “That cannot be right.”

Over his 68-page ruling, Myers tears the heart out of Griffin’s legal case, and eats it a piece at a time. 

“Judge Griffin offers several arguments,” Myers writes at one point, “but the court does not find any of them persuasive.”

‘No’

Riggs won the election by 734 votes, a margin confirmed by two recounts. Griffin initially sought to throw out more than 65,000 ballots, the bulk of which were from voters who were missing some required information on a state registration database. 

He also targeted more than 5,000 overseas military voters and their families because they did not include a copy of a Voter ID, which in-person voters are required to provide. The smallest bucket of contested ballots came from “never residents,” the adult children of North Carolina residents who were born abroad while their parents were in the military, or performing missionary work. State law expressly allows these voters to cast a ballot, but Griffin argued that law violated the state constitution requirement that only residents be allowed to vote. 

All of these contested voters followed the election rules at the time of the election, and all of the rules were clear and long-established. Griffin did not file his lawsuit before the election, nor did he file it early in the vote counting process when he was leading Riggs.

He only filed his suit after it was apparent he would lose.

And some of his ballot challenges did not seek to throw out ALL voters who voted a certain way, only those he thought likely voted for his opponent. He only challenged overseas voters from Democratic counties. He did not challenge the ballots of overseas voters from Republican counties.

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

A North Carolina appeals court panel backed Griffin in all three buckets of challenges, giving more than 65,000 voters 15 days to prove their identities and eligibility to vote or have their votes discarded. They also ruled that the never resident voters should be thrown out with no chance to prove themselves. The panel voted 2-1, with the one Democrat dissenting.

Soon after, the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court rejected the 60,000 missing data challenges, but sided with Griffin on military voters, bumping the deadline from 15 to 30 days. They also said never residents should be discarded with no recourse. Freelance journalist Bryan Anderson, however, found that at least 30 of these voters did have residential histories in the state. 

Those are not just background details, Myers wrote. They are everything. 

“This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals” he wrote.

“This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible.”

He continued: “The answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Griffin’s ask and the previous court’s orders “violate the equal protection and substantive due process rights of overseas military and civilian voters,” Myers wrote.

“The court further finds that discarding the votes of Never Residents without any process for those who may have been misclassified as ineligible violates procedural due process and represents an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.”

‘Stumbles right out of the gate’

Four of the North Carolina judges who heard Griffin’s case campaigned with him in the 2020 election, posing alongside him in smiling photos and calling him their friend on social media. Griffin, who has no known friends on the federal court, tried hard to keep the case out of federal courtrooms. 

Griffin claimed that the federal courts should not have gotten involved at all, citing a precedent in the Younger case which cemented a “longstanding public policy against federal court interference with state court proceedings.”

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

But, Myers wrote, the Younger precedent limited its thesis to three kinds of criminal and civil proceedings, none of which apply to election law of this scope and consequence. Apples to porcupines, Myers suggested.

“Judge Griffin’s Younger ‘argument stumbles right out of the gate,’” Myers wrote.

“He develops no argument that his post-election protests are akin to a state criminal prosecution, civil enforcement proceeding, or …‘civil contempt’ proceedings,” Myers added.

“And for good reason: they are not.”

This case, Myers wrote, is “a far cry from” the cases explicitly covered by the Younger precedent.

The case ‘offends equal protection principles.’

“The prospect that thousands of North Carolinians could have their votes discarded if they fail to comply with a retroactive cure process strikes this court as more than mere jot and tittle,” Myers wrote.

Voters who faced the chances their ballots could be thrown out not only followed the rules, but there was no way FOR them to do what Griffin said they should have done.

“In the months leading up to the election, the State Board also publicized guidance to overseas voters which informed them that they were exempt from the voter ID law,” Myers wrote.

“Thousands of overseas voters then, on election day, relied on the State Board’s rule and its guidance. In fact, they had to. Overseas voters submit their ballots through an online portal that lacked any mechanism for a voter to attach a copy of their photo ID.”

The Griffin case, he said, “offends equal protection principles.”

But even with 68 pages of showing his work, Myers found simple answers to the federal equations he was asked to solve. 

‘You don’t change [the rules] after the game is done.’

Elections should be administered by the rules in place at the time of the election, Myers wrote. It’s not any more complicated than that.

“That principle will be familiar to anyone who has played a sport or board game,” Myers wrote. “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done.”

Griffin, however, seeks a conclusion that “implicates the very integrity of the election and offends ‘the law’s basic interest in finality,’” Myers wrote.

To side with Griffin would open a door that may be impossible to close again. 

“Permitting parties to ‘upend the set rules’ of an election after the election has taken place can only produce ‘confusion and turmoil [which] threatens to undermine public confidence in the federal courts, state agencies, and the elections themselves,’” Myers wrote.

“The court cannot countenance that strategy.”