The Courts Must Stop This Judge From Stealing an Election

As President Trump started his second term by pardoning violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Republicans in North Carolina already had a monthslong effort underway to achieve, essentially, the same goal the insurrectionists had four years ago: to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

On Nov. 5, North Carolina voters re-elected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to her seat on the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court. The contest was close, but clear.

The result of this race was in line with the results of several other statewide elections in North Carolina where voters rejected far-right extremism, including in the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction. North Carolinians also elected enough Democrats to break a heavily gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the state legislature.

Yet when Justice Riggs defeated her Republican opponent — Judge Jefferson Griffin — he refused to accept the choice of North Carolina’s electorate. Despite two recounts and the North Carolina State Board of Elections confirming Justice Riggs’s victory, Judge Griffin sued, insisting that the State Supreme Court block the certification of Justice Riggs’s re-election and invalidate more than 60,000 valid ballots, a move clearly aimed at installing him as the victor. More specifically, in his challenge, Judge Griffin alleges that in the state’s registration database, records for most of the challenged voters lack a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. He also challenged the validity of a smaller number of votes cast by overseas citizens and military service members from several heavily Democratic counties.

But there is no suggestion that any of these 60,000-plus voters acted improperly, deliberately cast illegal ballots or failed to produce required identification when voting. And when the State Board of Elections reviewed his claim, it concluded, in a meticulous written decision, that Judge Griffin’s allegations lacked substance. The issue that is now before the courts is whether a court can simply cast aside tens of thousands of appropriately cast ballots after an election is over. This shouldn’t be a question: The United States Constitution and other federal laws protect against such ballots from being retroactively discarded.

Ordinarily, a request like this one would be a nonstarter. That a sitting judge filed this lawsuit in the first place is, frankly, disturbing. As an officer of the court who has sworn an oath, Judge Griffin has an obligation to protect the electoral process, not undermine it with a shameless attempt to disenfranchise voters. What’s even more distressing, though, is that the North Carolina Supreme Court’s Republican majority has allowed such a lawsuit to proceed and, in doing so, has stopped the certification of the election results.