Quietly, the most important political event in the country right now is happening in North Carolina.
In November, among dozens of other elections, North Carolina voters decided the race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, tightly contested between incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs and her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin. Out of 5.5 million votes, Riggs won by 734 — a number confirmed by two recounts, according to WRAL.
That should’ve been the end of it. It was a close race, but the recounts and the State Board of Elections confirmed that the people had spoken. That wasn’t enough for Jefferson Griffin, however.
After the final vote was confirmed, Griffin filed a challenge, asserting that 60,000 votes were illegitimate and should be thrown out. Though the State Board of Elections rejected this, the NC Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, gave life to the challenge, denying the election its certification. As of today, it’s the only race in the country not to have a certified winner, according to The New York Times
Griffin’s challenge is based on the claim that these 60,000 voters failed to provide requisite proof of identity when registering. There are two major problems with this claim itself.
First, as anyone who voted in NC this year knows, a new voter identification law required everyone who voted this year to present their drivers license before doing so, whether voting by mail or in person. Regardless of their registration, anyone who didn’t show ID was not allowed to vote.
Second, many on Griffin’s list of ‘illegitimate’ voters were found by the Times to simply be victims of clerical error: Parts of old registrations not properly uploaded to new databases, names changed after marriage, etc.
Regardless of the merit of Griffin’s claims, what he’s asking the court to do is unprecedented. If his challenge is successful, the Republican majority on the court would arbitrarily throw out the votes of tens of thousands of people in order to decide the outcome of an election that already happened. It would mean the court, rather than the citizens of the state, getting to decide who makes up its own body. This isn’t my own ideological concern — it’s a concern for the foundation of our democracy.
Four years ago, President Donald Trump attempted a public campaign to undermine the integrity of the presidential election, launching legal challenges in several states to stop the certification of what was widely acknowledged as a fair election. His efforts failed. Since then, members of Trump’s Republican party, such as gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake of Arizona, have similarly attempted to overturn elections, without success.
The court interfering to deny Riggs’ certification is now already the closest anyone has come to overturning an election. If the court rules in Griffin’s favor, North Carolina could move the country into uncharted territory: A political landscape where Republicans are emboldened to challenge close elections, where the public doesn’t trust electoral outcomes and where citizens have little power to change who’s in charge.
This could understandably sound far fetched. But we take our rights as members of a democratic society for granted; it hasn’t always been this way.
For decades, Black North Carolinians struggled through oppressive poll taxes, literacy laws, ‘Grandfather clauses’ and even racist massacres in order to fulfill their right to vote. Today, Jefferson Griffin proposes to throw out the votes of a group of citizens who are “much less likely to be white”, according to an analysis by Western Carolina University professor Chris Cooper. Disenfranchising a group of disproportionately Black and Hispanic voters in order to win an election doesn’t just recall an ugly history, it regresses us back towards it.
This isn’t a partisan issue. One of the Republican justices on the court, Richard Dietz, recognizes the dangerousness of the situation, and wrote a dissenting opinion to the ruling to stay the certification, writing that the challenge was “too late,” and that judicial intervention in the election would “damage the integrity of the election process.” Other conservatives have criticized Griffin, with Joshua Peters, a columnist who voted for Griffin, writing in the Carolina Journal that Griffin’s legal challenge is “unprecedented and undignified” and calling on Republicans to uphold the idea that “principle has no party affiliation.”
Griffin’s list of proposed voters to disenfranchise is available both in its full form, and with a website that allows you to search your own name. You shouldn’t assume your own vote is going unchallenged, as I was surprised to learn that my own name is one of the 60,000.
Hopefully, the North Carolina Supreme Court will perform its Constitutional duty and uphold Riggs’ victory. The eyes of the country and of history are on them. If not, it will be a dark day for democracy.
David Rosenblum • Jan 28, 2025 at 2:17 pm
Excellent article. Well written and explained simply.
Congratulations