OPINION: A child can figure out how to lose gracefully, so why can’t Jefferson Griffin?

My kid was a winner because he was brave and faced reality when he had lost. I wonder what that makes Jefferson Griffin?

Jefferson Griffin refusing to admit he lost his race for NC Supreme Court brings to mind the time when one of my sons was in elementary school, and he came home after a field day having won a footrace. 

But he didn’t shine with pride the way he commonly did. “Watch and wait” is usually the best policy for parents, so we did that, and soon we had one of those evening visits from a kid who couldn’t sleep because something was up.

It turned out he had come in second in the race, but the kid who beat him had been disqualified. There had been some jostling, and the kid was accused of unfairly elbowing. My kid was a cheerful rule-follower, whereas the other kid was commonly in trouble, so the accusation stuck effortlessly and my kid came home with the victory.

But it wasn’t true. When my son came downstairs that anxious night, he said that his friend had seen the jostling and instantly brought the accusation to the teacher. Thinking they would have a restart, my kid shrugged. When the teacher instead simply awarded the victory, things felt like they had progressed too far to make change, and my son went along. But inside he knew something had gone wrong, which was why we saw him in the living room late that evening.

The next morning I accompanied him to school and walked him to the gym. We found the athletics teacher; my kid asked for a moment of his time; they went into the office. A couple minutes later they were back out, with my son no longer the winner of the race. The teacher praised him for his honesty, though docked him some gym points for initially going along with an accusation that he suspected wasn’t true. (The teacher clearly understood that he was dealing with a kid swept up rather than a kid who’d cheated and then felt bad about it; the punishment was still correct.) 

All in all it was a win: a kid who knew that cheating, even accidental cheating that kind of sweeps you up, is wrong did the right thing and fixed the outcome. A kid who has a moral compass used that moral compass and moved on with his world. His head was higher and his shoulders relaxed. I was proud. We said all the usual things: you lost the race but you are certainly not a loser; quite the opposite. This brave moral stand marks you as a winner.

So you can see why I bring this all up. Because I wonder where the parents and teachers of Jefferson Griffin went wrong.

Griffin, as you well know, is the Court of Appeals judge who ran for a seat on the NC Supreme Court, which several recounts have proven beyond question that he lost by fewer than a thousand votes. This has to sting. He was appointed a District Court judge in 2015, then elected to the same position in 2016 and elected to the Court of Appeals in 2020. 

In 2024 he looked to make that next step and ran for the NC Supreme Court. And again: he lost. You count the votes, and if the other person (in this case, sitting Justice Allison Riggs) has more, you lose. You can stamp your feet, you can cry, you can have all the bad feelings you want to, especially if you lose by a very few votes. It’s frustrating. It’s hard.

But if you lose, you lose.

Unless you’re a North Carolina Republican. Griffin demanded recounts — twice — which is not only his right, but his responsibility. But in modern North Carolina, if a Republican keeps counting the votes and keeps losing, that doesn’t mean they lost: it means it’s time to change the rules because NC Republicans are not allowed to lose. At least as they see it.

The dispiriting claims Griffin’s team makes to justify their request to disenfranchise 60,000+ NC voters are depressing almost beyond imagination; they claim that irregularities not in the votes, but in identification — often caused by the state! — in some mail-in ballots render them invalid. 

There were no complaints when it looked like Griffin had won, of course; the complaints arose only after the recounts showed Griffin had lost. And of course, Griffin isn’t challenging all ballots with possible irregularities — only the groups he considers likely to have voted against him. And note they’re not asking to carefully check the validity, one by one, of the questioned votes. They just want to disenfranchise those voters because they voted the wrong way.

They’ll keep trying different courts in the hope that they can get someone to help them cheat. Reading the tea leaves, I can’t say I’m hopeful he won’t succeed. 

My kid was a winner because he was brave and faced reality when he had lost. I wonder what that makes Jefferson Griffin?