A federal judge has returned a lawsuit challenging thousands of votes cast in the November election filed by Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger for North Carolina Supreme Court, to state court. (File photos)
This story originally appeared on NC Newsline.
A federal judge on Monday sent Republican Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s elections case back to state court, which may leave the outcome of his race in the hands of the GOP majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
A few hours after U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II issued the order, the state Board of Elections and incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs filed notice of appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes, but Griffin has filed a series of voter protests. Griffin wants the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-2 majority, to throw out more than 60,000 votes on the belief that erasing them will allow him to defeat Riggs.
Democrats want to win back the Supreme Court majority by the next round of redistricting in 2031, and holding Riggs’ seat is an important first step in achieving that goal.
After the state Board of Elections rejected his protests last month, Griffin asked the state Supreme Court to step in to stop the board from certifying the election results and toss out the votes he’s contesting.
The Board of Elections had Griffin’s petition transferred to federal court, but Myers wrote in an order Monday that none of Griffin’s challenges “necessarily raise an issue of federal law.”
Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years.
The Republican Party used the same argument last year in a lawsuit seeking to have more than 225,000 voters purged from the registration rolls or to be forced to cast provisional ballots. Myers partially dismissed that suit.
The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.
A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names.
Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls. Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said.
“No one has come forward with information about any single person on these lists not providing all the information that’s requested of them,” Tindall said.“Data errors, typos, name changes” overlay all of it, she said.
Myers said in his order he considered the League of Women Voters’ brief.
Voters left incredibly frustrated by Griffin’s challenges
Spring Dawson-McClure is one such voter who supplied a partial Social Security number when she registered that didn’t get attached to her file.
She called Griffin’s challenge “mind-blowing and incredibly frustrating.”
Dawson-McClure is a North Carolina native and Orange County resident who voted for the first time when she was 18. She left the state for graduate school and work and returned in 2012. “I’ve been voting with the same name and the same Orange County address for 12 years,” she said in an interview.
Dawson-McClure said she ended up on Griffin’s list because of a database mismatch between her Social Security number and her married name.
Dawson-McClure provided an email she received on Dec. 30 from the Orange County Board of Elections saying that the partial Social Security number she provided didn’t match the last name Dawson-McClure and was therefore not attached to her registration. The partial Social Security number matched the last name Dawson, the email said, and now the number is attached to her registration.
Other races certified, Dems break GOP supermajority in NC House
Three Republican legislative candidates had filed protests with the State Board of Elections that mirrored Griffin’s, but those challenges have ended and the Democrats in those races are the official winners.
The Board issued certificates Monday to Democrat Bryan Cohn, who won a House district representing Vance and Granville counties, and to Democrats Terence Everitt, who won a Senate seat representing Granville and northern Wake County, and Woodson Bradley, who will represent a Mecklenburg County Senate district, the Associated Press reported.
Cohn’s victory means that Democrats have broken the Republican veto-proof majority in the House. Republicans hold a 30-20 majority in the Senate.
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