(The Center Square) – Just more than a week from four months since the Nov. 5 election, North Carolina has the only unresolved race in the nation.
State Supreme Court Seat 6, with an eight-year term, is in the balance of litigation involving the State Board of Elections, protests it denied from Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, and Democratic incumbent Judge Allison Riggs. The battle has gone as high as the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., and bounced between Wake County Superior Court, the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court.
When at the state’s high court, Riggs has recused herself. The bench began its 2025 calendar this month and Riggs remains seated pending the election outcome.
In the latest to and fro, the state Supreme Court denied a request by the state board to accelerate the appeals. Next up is expected to be the appeal of Superior Court Judge William Pittman’s decision to uphold the state board’s dismissal of Griffin’s six protests involving a total of about 65,000 ballots. That would happen at the state Court of Appeals in the usual three-judge panel.
An appeal of that court would go back to the state Supreme Court. Should Griffin prevail on the state level, the 4th Circuit has already established Riggs can return to its bench for merits involving federal elections and voting rights laws.
On Election Night, with 2,658 precincts reporting, Griffin led Riggs by 9,851 votes of 5,540,090 cast. Provisional and absentee ballots that qualified were added to the totals since, swinging the race by 10,585 votes.
Riggs is poised for a 734-vote win her party chairwoman, Anderson Clayton, calls “decisive” and the opposing chairman, Jason Simmons, says counts votes that are “blatant violations of state law.”
The state elections board, majority 3-2 Democrats, and Riggs are aligned in the litigation.
The protests the state board denied included registration records of voters, such as lack of providing either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. State law for that has been in place two decades, dating back to 2004; registrations prior were grandfathered in, Clayton explained.
Other ballots protested and denied by the state board included voters overseas who have never lived in the United States, and for lack of photo identification provided with military and overseas voters.
The calendar for the state Supreme Court has included two sessions this month and has another Tuesday.
