Voters line up outside the Durham Main Library in the November 2024 election. (Photo: Lynn Bonner)
As members of the Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central Universities, we have found abundant and incontrovertible evidence that youth voters in North Carolina – citizens between the ages of 18 and 25 – are disproportionately represented in Judge Jefferson Griffin’s challenge of the results in the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court election.
Among the 61,150 thousand voters with allegedly “incomplete voter registrations,” young voters are 3.4 times more likely than voters over 65 to have their votes challenged. Young Black voters, meanwhile, are 5.28 times more likely to be challenged than white men over the age of 65.
The attack on youth voting rights is also vividly present in the Griffin campaign’s challenge to overseas voters. He included just four Democratic majority counties in this part of his challenge: Durham, Guilford, Forsyth, and Buncombe, each of them home to large numbers of college students. The results are predictable if still shocking: young voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are 4.6 times more likely than voters over the age of 65 to be in this portion of the challenge. Although a far whiter cohort than voters with allegedly incomplete voter registrations, these young overseas voters are 4.7 times likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
Griffin argues that his challenge will protect the integrity of North Carolina’s electorate by excluding voters who have “illegal” voter registrations and overseas voters who were not required to show photo IDs. But the partisan and anti-youth biases in his challenges reveal their true purpose: to flip the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost by silencing young progressive voters. He offers disfranchisement as the remedy to the clerical challenges evident in the uneven record keeping practices of the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBOE). Such behavior is neither fair nor impartial and is beneath the dignity of a Supreme Court Justice.
Misrepresenting the facts
The Griffin campaign seeks to evade responsibility for these harms by blaming the SBOE for, as it claims, knowingly breaking the law by not requiring citizens to list the last four digits of their Social Security numbers when registering to vote. It has also suggested that the overseas voters in his challenge are not genuine North Carolinians, but outsiders seeking to interfere in an election in which they should not vote. In his revisionist account, Griffin is the victim — an honorable white man standing up for virtue and election integrity.
But research by the Student Voting Rights Lab into the voter registration histories of student voters reveals the absence of negligence on their part. We have thus far located 23 Duke students in the Griffin challenge who either retained copies of their original voter registration forms or who requested copies of them from the Durham County Board of Elections after learning they had been challenged.
Given the fact that all of them are listed as having incomplete voter registrations in North Carolina’s voter registration database, we expected most of them to have left the Social Security number section blank in their voter registration forms. What we discovered, however, was striking and consistent. Of these 23 students, 22 correctly listed the last four digits of their social security numbers. Our research is ongoing. But the compliance rate to the Social Security number requirement – at 96% — is stunning.
The case of Sofia Dib-Gomez, a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, illustrates not only the absence of negligence among the challenged, but a dedication to improving democracy and helping her peers be counted and heard.
Sofia began her studies at Duke University in the fall of 2024 and registered to vote in Durham County during her second week on campus. As a volunteer for Duke Votes, the nonpartisan student organization tasked with leading Duke’s voter registration efforts, Dib-Gomez knew well that citizens on campus without a North Carolina driver’s license needed to list the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration forms. She personally registered several hundred of her fellow students, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, to vote before the October 4th deadline. Every one of them did so correctly.
When she learned she was on the list of challenged voters, Dib-Gomez called the Durham County Board of Elections and requested a copy of her own original voter registration form. When it arrived, it clearly indicated her SSN was on the form. The Durham official could not explain why her Social Security number had not been entered into her vote registration file, but they reassured her in an email that her vote would count.
That reassurance, however well-intended, rings hollow in light of the Griffin campaign’s ongoing challenge to more than 61,150 voters. Indeed, Dib-Gomez and the 22 fellow Duke students whose voter registration forms we have verified are all still listed as having incomplete voter registrations at the SBOE. We do not know how, when, or why election officials in Durham did not put these voters’ last four Social Security numbers into their voter registration files, nor why their voter registrations have not been corrected. But the response to Dib-Gomez suggests that the resources required to fix and update voter registrations are in short supply, especially as officials struggle to keep up with the volume of requests the Griffin challenge has generated.
Staffing, resource shortages at the SBOE
The delayed response by the Durham County BOE to fixing omissions in voters’ registrations reveals no malevolence, however, and certainly not a pattern of willful lawbreaking as Griffin suggests. Rather, it highlights a deeper problem within boards of election: the lack of labor, time, and human resources required to maintain up-to-date voter registrations.
The case of Duke student Katherine Gallagher, also a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, further illuminates the record keeping challenge that local boards face in maintaining up to date voter registration records.
Gallagher was first registered to vote in Forsyth County when she received her driver’s license at the age of 16. When she moved to Durham and re-registered to vote she left the SSN section blank — the one student we have thus far found who did not list the last four digits of her Social Security number.
But that omission should not have mattered because Katherine knew the SBOE had her North Carolina driver’s license number. Unfortunately, the number seems to have been lost and not to have traveled with her when she re-registered. We do not know why that driver’s license number was not included when she updated her registration. When Gallagher learned her ballot was challenged, she called the Durham County BOE and was reassured that her vote would count because she had showed her driver’s license to county officials at the polls. Like Dib-Gomez, however, Gallagher ‘s voter registration record remains listed in BOE records as being incomplete.
Gallagher is not alone among North Carolinians who have valid driver’s license numbers listed in SBOE records, but who have wound up in the Griffin challenge anyhow. We have found 1,008 citizens among the 61,000 challenged voters who have valid North Carolina driver’s license numbers that are already filed at the SBOE, but whose numbers remain disconnected to their current registration files. More striking, we have located 3,822 voters within the challenge whose Social Security numbers are listed as complete in one set of BOE records, but who are still listed as possessing incomplete voter registrations.
Updating the voter registration files within the NCBOE has become a pressing challenge in light of the Griffin campaign’s efforts to disfranchise thousands of North Carolinians. But that kind of election work requires funding which has been notoriously difficult to extract from the Republican dominated North Carolina legislature over the past decade.
The SBOE’s work of record keeping has also grown harder of late, with difficult choices between keeping voter registrations up to date, making sure election workers are well trained, maintaining consistent ways of counting the growing number of provisional ballots cast across the state, and responding to thousands of anxious voters who are in the Griffin challenge. Given the additional burdens of a global pandemic in 2020 and a disastrous hurricane in 2024, it is remarkable how well BOE officials have managed their central tasks over the past several election cycles.
Implications of the state’s voter photo ID requirement
Considering the fact that North Carolina’s new voter photo ID requirement has obviated the need to use Social Security numbers to verify citizens’ identities, it seems unwise to ask the SBOE to devote scarce resources to updating voter registration information. Indeed, the Griffin campaign’s emphasis on SSNs indirectly challenges the primacy of the new photo ID law by suggesting that Social Security numbers are more important than state approved photo IDs. That decision has already been made by the voters of North Carolina in 2018 when they voted for a constitutional amendment to make photo identification the key form of voter verification. The biggest portion of the Griffin challenge may be unconstitutional.
That has not stopped the Griffin team from using the photo ID law to challenge the voting rights of a different cohort of voters, however: overseas voters who did are not required to present election officials with verifiable photo ID when voting. Now a defender of the photo ID requirement, Griffin’s campaign argues these voters have violated the state’s constitution.
But the practice of exempting overseas voters from the photo ID requirement is based in law and resembles the exemptions that many voters filed across North Carolina during the 2024 election who did not have access to securing authorized photo IDs. Requiring university students studying abroad to produce student ID cards that are only available on home campuses, for example, is clearly an unreasonable burden to voting. That burden also applies to North Carolina’s military service people who do not have access to their photo IDs when serving in combat.
Seeking to avoid the unpopular optic of disfranchising active-duty military personnel, Griffin has instead focused on university students, choosing to challenge overseas voters hailing from just four student heavy counties.
But the case of Duke student Olivia Schramkowski, another member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, illustrates the unfairness and inconsistency of this portion of the Griffin challenge. A devoted North Carolina voter, Schramkowski spent the fall semester studying in London, but was dedicated to helping fellow college students in North Carolina cast ballots in the 2024 election. Like Dib-Gomez and Gallagher, she consulted with Durham County BOE officials to make sure she knew what was required of her and voters like her. She offered to send a copy of her photo ID along with her absentee ballot, but was told by an official with the NCBOE that “photo ID is not required for absentee ballots requested through FPCA,” (the Federal Post Card Application).
With that assurance in mind, Schramkowski authored a non-partisan guide on how to vote while living abroad, shared it with Duke administrators and members of the Student Voting Rights Lab, and helped 264 Duke students successfully cast their ballots. Now, every one of these North Carolinians finds their ballots challenged.
A dangerous precedent
Throughout the unfolding of Judge Griffin’s challenge, the candidate has claimed to be a victim of illegal balloting and the actions of the SBOE, while presenting himself as a defender of election integrity. Our research, however, documents the harm Griffin is causing to the very communities he should be defending as a potential North Carolina Supreme Court justice.
If youth voting rights in North Carolina were secure, the supportive messages from county election officials to challenged young voters would indeed be reassuring. Sadly, young citizens find their ballots and their rights attacked by a judicial candidate posing as an impartial public servant. Because young North Carolinians citizens are the future of our state, these harms extend beyond one judicial election and one election cycle to the voting rights of every North Carolinian.
The members of the Student Voting Rights Lab who contributed research and/or testimonies for use in this commentary are Abdel Shehata, Sofia Dib-Gomez, Katherine Gallagher, Rhiannon Camarillo, Liv Schramkowski, Annika Aristimuno, and Jessie Rievman. My thanks go out to all of the students participating in the Student Voting Rights Lab for their insights, moral energy, and curiosity. I especially thank my Co-Director, Professor Artemesia Stanberry of the Political Science Department at NCCU. – Prof. Gunther Peck