Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline
North Carolinians made their choices at the ballot box more than two months ago.
The votes were tallied by our state’s dedicated election workers (three times over) and nearly all the candidates accepted the results, knowing that the people of our state had spoken. But for one losing state Supreme Court candidate, that’s not been the case.
Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate, ran for and lost a seat on the highest court in our state to his Democratic challenger Allison Riggs in a race where more than 5.5 million ballots were cast. Rather than accepting his loss, he is trying to toss out the votes of more than 60,000 North Carolinians.
Griffin disproportionately is targeting some of our most vulnerable voters. For example, Black voters are twice as likely to be challenged by Judge Griffin as white voters. Latino and younger voters are also more likely to be at risk of having their votes erased.
Griffin’s attempt to undermine voters is not just far-fetched, it’s dangerous and threatens lasting damage to our state if successful.
The basic principles of elections are pretty simple. Candidates and voters follow the relevant federal and state rules: eligible voters cast ballots for their preferred candidates under those rules, and election officials count the votes. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Because Griffin got fewer votes, he lost. That’s called democracy!
In close elections, there are safeguards such as recounts to ensure election rules were followed properly. People can turn to the courts for help if any rules were broken.
But that’s not what Judge Griffin is asking for in his race. Having lost, he now wants a “do-over” of his election. Not just any “do-over,” but one under a different set of rules, carefully crafted by his lawyers to ensure the outcome would come out in his favor.
This is unprecedented in modern day elections. We at the NAACP North Carolina State Conference have never been granted any relief like that, even in cases where we proved that Black voters’ rights were violated.
For example, several elections went by using North Carolina’s 2011 congressional and state legislative voting districts before they were struck down as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, illegally packing Black voters into fewer districts. In the 2016 primary election, North Carolina enforced a voter ID requirement later deemed illegal because it targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” We didn’t get a do-over.
More recently in 2022, Black voters in Alabama were told it was too close to the election to fix congressional districts that violated their right to equal voting power under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In each of these circumstances (and countless others), voters weren’t allowed to go back in time and undo the rules in place when they voted, even though those rules were found to be illegally discriminatory and were struck down for future elections.
Neither voters nor candidates were entitled to a different outcome. The rules that were in place for those elections still applied.
Griffin’s request for a re-do of how votes were counted in the 2024 General Election is especially awful here because he has presented no evidence showing that any of the 60,000 voters he has challenged were ineligible to vote or did anything but follow the rules applied at the time they voted. In short, he apparently wants a do-over simply because he lost, not because there is proof that there was anything wrong with the election.
What we need now is for our courts to defend the rights of these 60,000 North Carolinians to participate in our democracy. No one – not a candidate, not a party, not the courts – should be able to disenfranchise voters simply because they don’t like the results of an election.