General
Federal Ruling Says State Courts Should Decide North Carolina Election Case
Three counts found an incumbent Democrat won a State Supreme Court race. But the Republican candidate is trying to nullify more than 60,000 votes.
A federal appeals court said on Tuesday that the legal battle in North Carolina over a State Supreme Court seat should be decided in state court.
The opinion from a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dealt a major blow to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, who narrowly won the seat in November but whose Republican challenger is seeking to flip the result.
Justice Riggs had sought to have the issue resolved in federal court. Tuesday’s ruling means that her colleagues on the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, may end up settling the dispute.
Justice Riggs and the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which also wanted federal courts to decide the matter, could still petition for the full appeals court to hear the case.
Three vote counts found that the Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, lost the race. The final count, by the elections board in December, found that Justice Riggs won by 734 votes, out of the more than 5.5 million that were cast.
But Judge Griffin, who currently sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, and conservative election deniers have embarked on an extraordinary effort to wipe away that result, and persuade the courts to throw out tens of thousands of ballots that were cast by mail or during early voting.
