State Trial Court Rules Against Throwing Out 60,000+ Legal Votes
NC Superior Court Judge William Pittman has rejected losing Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin’s campaign to overturn the results of the election he lost to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs. Griffin has been fighting to overturn his loss by asking the state courts to throw away the ballots of 60,000+ North Carolina citizens who registered to vote and did vote last year according to all the rules in place at the time.
The Ruling and What to Expect
On Friday (Feb. 7), Wake County Superior Court Judge Pittman ruled that the NC State Board of Elections (SBOE) made no error in rejecting Griffin’s claims. The SBOE ruled in December that Griffin had presented no evidence to show that any voter challenged was ineligible to vote or had failed to follow state law in registering and voting.
In the hearing before Judge Pittman, the attorney for Justice Riggs, Raymond Bennett, said, “Judge Griffin concedes that not a single voter was ineligible based on the rules that were in place at the time of the election. Now he wants to change those rules. That kind of retroactive disenfranchisement is fundamentally unfair. It’s anti-democratic, and it violates state law.”
In a statement released after the Superior Court Ruling, Justice Allison Riggs said, “Today’s decisions denying Judge Griffin’s challenges of more than 65,000 ballots are a victory for North Carolina voters and the rule of law. Voters decide elections, and I remain committed to seeing this fight through and upholding North Carolinians’ constitutional freedoms.”
Griffin is expected to appeal to the state Court of Appeals, and if unsuccessful there to the state Supreme Court.
The Case in Federal Court
Last Monday (Feb. 3), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard arguments on whether to take back jurisdiction over the case from the NC state courts. The Appeals Court panel decided that because the case had been sent back by a federal District Court judge to the state, and the NC Supreme Court had issued a stay on certification of Justice Allison Rigg’s victory until Griffin’s challenges could be heard in court, that the case should stay in state court at this time. However, the Fourth Circuit panel also said that it retained the option of rehearing the case on federal legal grounds, depending on the outcome in state court.
Advocacy Groups Speak Up
Also last week, multiple citizen advocacy groups supporting voting rights released statements or information concerning the case. The Student Voting Rights Lab at NC Central and Duke universities released an analysis that young voters and Black voters are disproportionately represented in the voters challenged by Griffin.
“Among the 61,150 thousand voters with allegedly ‘incomplete voter registrations,’ young voters are 3.4 times more likely than voters over 65 to have their votes challenged. Young Black voters, meanwhile, are 5.28 times more likely to be challenged than white men over the age of 65.”
In another category of voters challenged by the Griffin campaign, only voters from four heavily Democratic-voting counties (Buncombe, Durham, Forsyth, and Guilford) were challenged. The campaign was clearly manipulating its challenge to target only voters statistically less likely to have supported Griffin.
Amicus Brief Calling for Dismissal
Last week after the Fourth Circuit ruling but prior to the hearing in state Superior Court, a coalition of nonpartisan civic engagement and civil rights organizations filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief calling for the dismissal of Griffin’s challenges. The groups included the N.C. State Conference of the NAACP, N.C. Black Alliance, Common Cause Education Fund, Democracy North Carolina, El Pueblo, N.C. Asian Americans Together, and the N.C. Poor People’s Campaign.
“These are voters who have not only done nothing wrong, but who in fact followed all the rules that were asked of them,” the amicus brief states. “Stunningly, Judge Griffin fails to allege any evidence that even a single one of these voters is actually ineligible to vote in North Carolina—only that they should have anticipated his unprecedented challenges and followed an alternative hypothetical set of rules, never provided to them by the state, when casting their ballot.”
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