The North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling last week in a case over contested ballots in the 2024a race for a seat on the high court has launched a flurry of new legal battles that are now playing out in multiple courthouses.

Jefferson Griffin, a Republican judge on the state Court of Appeals, challenged Democratic incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs for her seat in November. Recounts showed that Griffin received 734 fewer votes than Riggs.

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Griffin then challenged the validity of about 65,000 voters, saying their ballots should be thrown out. Last week the Supreme Court shot down some of Griffin’s arguments but ruled in his favor in enough of the others that he could potentially be declared the winner once the lawsuits are over.

Riggs has now gone to federal court seeking to stop that ruling altogether. She’s asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to at least temporarily pause the state Supreme Court order while it considers her arguments to overturn it.

Regardless of the eventual ruling in that Fourth Circuit appeal by Riggs, it’s likely that at least one of the many parties involved — who include Riggs, Griffin, the elections board, individual voters and voting rights groups — will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and have the final say.

Meanwhile in a state appellate court, as well as in a federal trial court, arguments are swirling over how exactly the Supreme Court’s decision — which contained just one sentence on the key part of the ruling — should now be interpreted. Griffin is fighting the State Board of Elections over implementation of the Supreme Court order, saying election officials on the Democratic-majority board are purposefully misreading that order in a way that will disadvantage him.

That fight will determine whether ballot challenges go forward against as few as 1,400 voters or as many as 7,000 — numbers that could make a massive difference in deciding who wins the race.

Because Griffin challenged voters only from a handful of Democratic counties, his chances of winning go up as the number of challenged ballots go up. The elections board wants to limit the challenges, but Griffin says they can’t do that.

“The board’s intended defiance requires immediate redress,” Griffin wrote to his fellow judges on the state Court of Appeals this week, requesting they do something to “leave the state board no room to circumvent the court’s directions.” Griffin and Riggs have recused themselves from the case in their respective courts.

Griffin is also expected to fight Riggs’ effort in federal appeals court to stop the state Supreme Court ruling from going into effect. He has until Monday to file a response to Riggs’ request, as does the elections board, which is a separate party in the case. Riggs has requested that the court rule on her request as soon as Wednesday.

“We are continuing to stand up for military voters in federal court to protect their constitutional rights to vote,” said Dory MacMillan, an advisor for Riggs. “We are grateful to these brave Americans for their service and know that they deserve better than this. Justice Riggs took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and we will fight tooth and nail against any effort to disenfranchise even one single lawful voter.”

Griffin has argued in court that he can’t personally violate voters’ constitutional rights since he’s suing in his capacity as a private person, not a judge. He has also said he’s not trying to disenfranchise legitimate voters, telling the state Supreme Court last week that those allegations “are easily exposed as hyperbole” and that he supports allowing most overseas voters to have their ballots counted if they can prove their identity.

Regardless of the eventual ruling in that Fourth Circuit appeal by Riggs, it’s likely that at least one of the many parties involved — who include Riggs, Griffin, the elections board, individual voters and voting rights groups — will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and have the final say.

Legal ping pong

In the weeks after the 2024 election Griffin filed about 65,000 challenges against North Carolina voters, claiming that their votes should never have been counted in the first place.

The state elections board rejected that argument in December. After the case bounced around between state and federal court for several weeks, Griffin lost at trial in February in Wake County Superior Court. He then won a full victory at the state Court of Appeals, followed by his partial victory at the Supreme Court.

So far the rulings in state court have broken down almost entirely along party lines. Whether that trend continues in federal court will be closely watched. The U.S. Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican majority.

In its 4-2 decision last week the state Supreme Court ruled against the majority of Griffin’s challenges, which targeted tens of thousands of people whose identifying information was missing from a state spreadsheet of registered voters, largely due to typos made by government workers filling out the forms.

But the court ruled in Griffin’s favor by retroactively making certain overseas voters ineligible to vote and throwing out their ballots, a decision that affects a few hundred people. The court also said Griffin was right to claim that other overseas voters should’ve shown photo identification, even though it wasn’t required at the time. The justices gave those voters 30 days to provide acceptable ID or valid exemption forms, or else have their ballots thrown out.

Griffin’s attempt to toss the ballots has received national attention for its potential to overturn the results of North Carolina’s 2024 Supreme Court election, by using novel legal theories that critics say could lay the groundwork for similar lawsuits all over the country by losing candidates in future elections.

Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, said on a podcast with Riggs this week that Griffin’s case “has a really negative impact on our society and the belief that people have in government.”

The North Carolina Republican Party, however, said the Supreme Court’s decision in Griffin’s favor — authored by the court’s Republican majority — is vindication for Griffin and state GOP leaders, who have heavily backed the effort to throw out the votes.

“Judge Jefferson Griffin, his family, and the NCGOP for months endured wild, baseless attacks and incendiary rhetoric for daring to stand firm on the issues of election integrity,” the NCGOP wrote in a statement.

Overseas voters

A key factor in the case is that while no overseas voters showed ID in 2024, Griffin didn’t challenge most of their ballots. Instead, he challenged overseas voters from only four Democratic-leaning counties, and not the state’s other 96 counties. And there are lingering questions over whether he properly filed all the challenges for those four counties.

But when the Supreme Court gave life to Griffin’s challenge against those select overseas voters, it did so in a single sentence with no further instructions.

“For the second category military or overseas ballots cast under Article 21A for whom the Board of Elections failed to follow the express requirements of N.C.G.S. § 163-230.1 we allow the petitions for the limited purpose of expanding the period to cure deficiencies arising from lack of photo identification or its equivalent from fifteen business days to thirty calendar days after the mailing of notice,” the order said.

Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote in her dissent that doing so was a mistake not just because it violated those voters’ constitutional rights but also because of the lack of clarity. Earls said it wasn’t clear how many voters might be open to challenges, writing that it was “possibly at least 2,000 to 7,000 votes of military and overseas voters.”

The Republican justices who ruled in Griffin’s favor would’ve had the chance to read Earls’ dissent and adjust their ruling to address that concern, as is common practice on the court, but they chose not to address it. It’s unclear why. A court spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Regardless, the elections board now says it believes it can legally force only the overseas voters from Guilford County to prove their identity — and not the other three counties of Forsyth, Durham and Buncombe — since Griffin didn’t file complete protests in those other counties by the time the deadline to do so had passed.

Elections board chairman Alan Hirsch previously called Griffin’s attempts to throw out people’s votes after the election “anathema to the democratic system.”

Challenging only the Guilford County voters would require 1,409 people to show their ID or else have their ballots tossed. Griffin says thousands more voters, from all four counties, should be required to show ID. He doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t open the challenges up statewide, however, to all overseas voters who didn’t show ID.

And then there are the 266 voters whose ballots the Supreme Court said should be thrown out because they checked a box saying they’ve never resided in North Carolina.

State law for the past 15 years has allowed those “never-residents” to vote here if their parents are North Carolina voters; it’s aimed at the children of soldiers and missionaries living abroad. But in Griffin’s lawsuit, the Court of Appeals ruled that that law is unconstitutional and their ballots should be thrown out retroactively. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand.

Griffin also disagrees with how the elections board wants to treat the never-resident voters. Even though he only challenged 266 of them from 53 counties, he now says the state should take a more thorough look at the records and throw out all never-resident ballots from all 100 counties. Griffin doesn’t explain in legal filings why he thinks all the never-residents should be challenged, but not all the overseas voters who didn’t show ID.

Griffin also opposes the board’s plan to look into the never-resident voters to see if they actually have resided in North Carolina before. Elections officials say they don’t want to wrongfully disenfranchise someone who actually would be eligible to vote under the new rules.

Griffin says that even if they accidentally or mistakenly checked that box, their ballot should be thrown out.

“The court should also make clear to the board that it is not to contact these voters and not to offer them an opportunity to cure,” Griffin said, using the technical term for allowing voters to correct mistakes on forms or ballots.