Longtime First Draft reader Lex Alexander is back with more insight into his home state of North Carolina. In this post, Lex takes a look at some sticky business involving the Tar Heel state GOP’s attempt to steal a seat on the state Supreme Court.
-Adrastos
Courting A Theft? by Lex Alexander
There’s one November 2024 election in the entire country that isn’t certified yet. That’s because Republicans are trying to steal it.
The race is for a state Supreme Court seat here in North Carolina. Incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs won the election by 734 votes over her Republican challenger, state Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin. With a name like Jefferson, you’d think there’s probably a college photo of this mook in a Confederate Army uniform, and you’d be right.
The canvass and two recounts all found that Riggs won. But when Republicans can’t win, they cheat, and so it was that Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections to have about 66,000 ballots thrown out in the race:
- More than 60,000 voters who, because of flawed registration forms or clerical errors, do not have a driver’s-license number of Social Security number on file.
- About 5,500 absentee voters, primarily military and overseas folks, who were not required at the time of the election to attach a photo ID to their ballots. Griffin is arguing that they should have been.
- About 500 people who have never resided in North Carolina, but could vote anyway based on a state law that Griffin says violated the state Constitution. These voters are mostly children of North Carolina residents who live overseas.
The disputed ballots were from overwhelmingly Democratic areas, not statewide. And the ballots would be discarded for the state Supreme Court race only, not from any other race that was on the ballot.
In December, the Democratic-controlled State Board of Elections dismissed Griffin’s protests. A lot of legalese has transpired since in both state and federal courts, and it’s not over yet. Most recently, on April 11, the state Supreme Court, with Riggs abstaining, ruled that the absentee and “never resided” voters would have 30 days to prove their eligibility or else their ballots would be discarded.
So it’s not clear who’s going to win, because no one knows how many ballots will be “cured” by voters providing the necessary information or voter ID and how many will be discarded. Problem is, if the ruling holds up, the ballot curing would be required even though doing so requires voters to submit information they weren’t required to in November.
If that sounds weird and maybe illegal, that’s because it is: Both federal and state law bar post-election changes to election law from being applied retroactively. But, as I say, the court battles continue.
State Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton said this month that this isn’t just about one Supreme Court seat.
“Today it’s a Supreme Court race in our state, but in 2026 it’s a United States House of Representatives seat,” she said. “It’s a governor’s seat. It’s any race that Republicans lose on the margins in places where voters tend to balance their ballots.”
State Rep. Phil Rubin, D-Wake County, has introduced a bill to make clear that election-law changes can’t be enforced retroactively. It also would bar ballots from being struck for purely clerical reasons.
“You can’t throw out votes by changing the rules of an election after it’s finished,” Rubin said. “Doing that disenfranchises the voters who relied on those procedures. It violates their fundamental right to vote and to due process.”
He added: “What is rewarded is repeated, and even though he will lose his challenges in the end, Judge Griffin’s tactics have lasted long enough that we should count on seeing them nationwide in future elections. That is why we have to act now.”
To that I’ll just add Alexander’s Axiom of Politics: If you have to cheat to win, your ideas suck.