The continuing effort by election loser Judge Jefferson Griffin to throw out thousands of legally cast ballots moved back to federal court last week. Election winner Justice Allison Riggs and others filed for emergency relief in United States District Court, challenging the order by the NC Supreme Court to discard hundreds of legal votes and put thousands more in jeopardy.
In response, US District Judge Richard Myers (Eastern District of NC) issued an order directing the NC State Board of Elections (NCSBE) to begin the process of implementing the state Supreme Court’s order regarding challenged ballots, but barred NCSBE from certifying a winner until the courts have finished their reviews. Attorneys for Justice Riggs, the NCSBE, and other parties immediately sought review of this order in the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. “This Court must intervene to prevent a retroactive application of a state court ruling that infringes North Carolina voters’ fundamental rights,” Riggs attorney Sam Hartzell wrote in a filing to the 4th Circuit late Wednesday (April 16).
Who is Disqualified?
While waiting for a decision by the 4th Circuit, the NCSBE began the process of determining which votes they have been instructed to review. In a measure of the absurdity and hypocrisy of Griffin’s after-the-fact challenges, he is now disputing the NCSBE’s understanding of which voters must be reviewed. On the one hand, he claims that NCSBE must search out and disqualify all voters around the state who meet the definition of a class of voters disqualified under the NC Supreme Court’s order, despite the fact that his campaign only identified fewer than 300 such voters from his selected counties. On the other hand, he continues to insist that military and other overseas voters from all six counties he wishes to challenge—and only those six counties—be subject to review. The NCSBE says only about 1,500 voters from one county (Guilford) are subject to this review under the Supreme Court’s order, because Griffin’s lawyers only completed the challenge filing process for that county prior to the state statutory deadline for challenges. Plainly, that statutory deadline contemplated the use of challenges only for specific voters for whom actual eligibility to vote was in dispute due to identified individual problems, not for sweeping categories of voters who might be affected by post-election changes in election rules.
New Action in Court
Meanwhile, attorneys representing the NC League of Women Voters and multiple challenged voters from central North Carolina filed a new action in US District Court for the Western District of NC, which covers cases originating in those counties. They asked that the Court certify their case as a “class action” representing all voters covered by the remaining challenges, and that the court declare the challenged absentee votes valid and order the NCSBE to certify the results of the election as confirmed by the recounts. “Voters in the 2024 elections … could not possibly have complied with a requirement that, at the time, did not exist,” lawyers for the plaintiffs said in their complaint, which was filed last Monday (April 14).
These plaintiffs are represented by attorneys with the Protect Democracy Project, a nonpartisan non-profit organization which seeks to help protect voting rights. The new filing asserts that under the NC Supreme Court ruling the state is violating the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by failing to apply the same rules for elections to all similarly situated voters, and is violating the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution by changing the rules governing an election after the election has already been completed.
Approaching six months after the 2024 elections, Justice Allison Riggs is still the only election winner in America whose victory has not been certified.
