Summary:
- North Carolina Republicans are one step away from stealing a seat on the state Supreme Court
- Republican Jefferson Griffin ran for North Carolina Supreme Court in 2024 and narrowly lost
- The Griffin campaign is asking the state Supreme Court to arbitrarily nullify 60,000 votes – which their campaign conveniently selected
The Supreme Court of North Carolina has been asked to rule on a bizarre request from Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican challenger for an Associate Justice seat on that same court. Last week, the Griffin campaign filed a request for the state’s highest court to toss out 60,000 votes, thus reversing the outcome of the election which Griffin lost. In doing so, Jefferson Griffin’s crusade against the voters of North Carolina is not only anti-democratic, but anathema to the rule of law.
Simply put, this is a grim preview of North Carolina’s political future. Should Griffin’s request be granted, North Carolina’s already threadbare democracy could be irreparably torn. Overturning the will of the voters in a valid election is a major escalation from ordinary partisan politics, and should be roundly condemned across the political spectrum.
How We Got Here
Justice Allison Riggs won the race for North Carolina Supreme Court by 734 votes – a close margin by almost any standard but that of the North Carolina Supreme Court itself. (Famously, the race for Chief Justice in 2020 was decided by only 401 votes.) This year, following procedure as requested by the candidates, the State Board of Elections confirmed Riggs’s victory in a November recount. Then it confirmed it again in a partial hand recount in December, where Riggs picked up even more votes than Griffin, disqualifying him from ordering another third, full-hand eye recount.
Rather than accept the result of a close election, a frustrated Griffin decided instead to adopt a long-shot strategy to throw out at least 60,000 North Carolinians’ votes, based on a legal theory even his own campaign initially dismissed as too frivolous to be taken seriously. Accordingly, the State Board of Elections rejected this request. After an investigation, the Board correctly found that Griffin’s complaints about those votes “did not establish probable cause to believe that a violation of election law or irregularity or misconduct occurred in the protested elections.”
It was not until the fourth time that the State Board of Elections confirmed Griffin’s loss that the Republican judge and his campaign gave up on due process. Instead of going through the appeals process as outlined in North Carolina state law, Griffin instead filed what’s called a “Writ of Prohibition” directly with the North Carolina Supreme Court.
After a brief attempt to move the inquiry into federal court, which was considered and then rejected by a federal judge, the North Carolina Supreme Court granted Griffin’s request for a temporary pause on certifying the election so that the court could review Griffin’s demand to throw out the ballots his campaign deems necessary to secure a win. Justice Riggs, meanwhile, has asked the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case.
Democracy means something
The pattern of both the Griffin campaign and the NCGOP in their litigation strategy of the 2024 election has been a series of acrobatic leaps from one tortured legal theory to another, without any coherent connecting principle or idea but simple partisan gain. Most revealing, perhaps, is the fact that the Republican argument is limited to throwing out votes only in the state Supreme Court case where Griffin lost – but not, for example, in the Presidential race, where the Republican candidate won. All the votes for Trump were legitimate, Griffin insists – it was only further down on the ballot where they suddenly became invalid.
Any reasonable person can agree that this argument is farcical – and yet, here we are.
If Griffin’s argument beggars belief, it’s because it is not actually meant to be believed at all, but instead, to be utilized. Griffin is offering the Republican majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court no more than a vehicle of convenience for trading a Democratic member for a fellow Republican. But that trade comes with a cost: overturning and reversing an election whose other outcomes have mysteriously prompted no other such concerns of skullduggery.
To say that this represents a dizzying escalation from normal partisan conflict is an understatement. Even in North Carolina, we do not casually reverse election outcomes. That the Griffin campaign has failed to this day to demonstrate even one single vote that they can show was fraudulently cast puts the hollowness of this argument on stark display.
Jefferson Griffin has demonstrated not just an appalling lack of judgment, but the absence of even the basic ethical core required to practice law, let alone serve as a judge. Not only should the North Carolina Supreme Court reject his frivolous request, but Griffin should be removed from his seat on the Court of Appeals for serious misconduct. That is very unlikely to happen only because base partisanship rules much of how basic matters of state are conducted in North Carolina. Let us hope it does not overwhelm the basic foundations of representative government as well.
