Federal judge punts disputed judicial race back to North Carolina's conservative state Supreme Court

WUNC | By Rusty Jacobs

Published January 6, 2025 at 8:46 PM EST

https://www.wunc.org/2025-01-06/nc-supreme-court-race-federal-judge-allison-riggs-jefferson-griffin

Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin is getting the audience he wanted for his claim that 60,000 ballots should be invalidated in his electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs. A federal district court judge has remanded Griffin's election protest to the heavily conservative state Supreme Court, the same court Griffin is trying to join.

After the general election and two recounts — a statewide machine recount and a partial hand-to-eye recount of ballots from randomly selected early voting sites and Election Day precincts in each county — Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent, holds a 734-vote lead over Griffin.

The vote count notwithstanding, Griffin, a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, has fought to throw out more than 60,000 ballots for alleged irregularities despite lacking evidence of any actual voter ineligibility.

In most of the cases, Griffin has alleged the disputed ballots were cast by voters who did not properly register under North Carolina law. The issue has to do with voters who registered — some of them many years and election cycles ago — using a form that predated the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002. The pre-HAVA registration form did not clearly mandate registrants provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver's license number.

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https://www.wunc.org/2025-01-06/nc-supreme-court-race-federal-judge-allison-riggs-jefferson-griffin