(The Center Square) – With seven days available for appeal, a federal judge on Monday evening ordered the North Carolina State Board of Elections to certify Allison Riggs the winner over Jefferson Griffin in the election for eight years in Seat 6 of the state Supreme Court.
Chief Justice Richard Myers, presiding in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina Western Division, said the state board “shall not take any action in furtherance of the North Carolina Court of Appeals and Supreme Court’s orders.” Griffin, the Republican challenger and a justice on the state’s appellate court, was denied motions for injunctive relief.
This is the nation’s last unresolved election, one that drew in $2.3 million in campaign donations. The filing says, “The court’s order is stayed for 7 days, so that Judge Griffin may pursue an appeal if he so chooses.” At the time of ruling, Monday marked 182 days since Election Day.
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 has been poised for a 734-vote win. Griffin protested about 65,000 ballots on multiple counts, and the state board rejected all of them. Most were by 3-2 party-line votes.
Board of elections decisions and court rulings – Wake County Superior Court, state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, and 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – had pared that initial number down to somewhere between 1,675 and 5,700 for this decision by Myers.
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.
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. Myers’ ruling is the final blow to these protests.
Griffin is trying to become the sixth Republican in a row to win a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. Democrats held a 6-1 edge going into the 2020 election and lost three state Supreme Court races, reducing their advantage to 4-3. In 2022, Republicans won both races to gain their 5-2 majority.
The Supreme Court bench has historically been both nonpartisan and partisan. The General Assembly, under majority Democrats, changed the bench to nonpartisan for the 2004 election cycle; Republicans, in majority, changed it back after the 2016 election cycle.
Riggs has been recused from all actions involving the state Supreme Court. She remains seated until the election is resolved. Griffin is a judge on the state Court of Appeals and has been recused from all actions there as well.
Riggs is trying to win her first judicial election and as an incumbent no less, appointed by then-Gov. Roy Cooper nine months after he had appointed her to the Court of Appeals following her 14-year stint with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
Griffin earned his eight-year seat on the appellate bench with a 2020 win over Democrat Chris Brook. He had lost two years earlier to Toby Hampson in a three-way race that included two Republicans.
