NC Supreme Court Candidate: More Than 5K Overseas Ballots With No Voter ID Were Counted Illegally
Elections are not over yet in North Carolina, as Republican state Supreme Court candidate Judge Jefferson Griffin filed a brief challenging 5,509 overseas voters who did not provide identification with their ballots in the 2024 election.
Griffin’s case is being heard by the very Supreme Court upon which he hopes to serve, as his incumbent Democrat opponent, Justice Allison Riggs, is recused from the case. Earlier this month, the state’s high court blocked the Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) from certifying the election for Riggs before Griffin’s case was heard.
The Tuesday filing narrows the focus of Griffin’s election protests from his challenge of over 60,000 ballots that he says were cast illegally.
“At bottom, this case presents a fundamental question: who decides our election laws? Is it the people and their elected representatives, or the unelected bureaucrats sitting on the State Board of Elections? If the Board gets its way, then it is the real sovereign here. It can ignore the election statutes and constitutional provisions, while administering an election however it wants,” Griffin’s filing said. “The State Board is an administrative agency that has broken the law for decades, while refusing to correct its errors. This lawlessness was brought to the Board’s attention back in 2023 and again in 2024, both before the 2024 general election, but the Board refused to follow the law. Now those chickens have come home to roost.”
On election night in November, Griffin was leading Riggs by around 10,000 votes, but over the succeeding nine days, overseas, absentee, and provisional ballots slowly started eating away at his lead, ultimately flipping the vote totals in favor of Riggs. She currently leads by 734 votes.
North Carolina law requires that all voters in the state provide photo identification to vote, in person and absentee. However, an NCSBE rule provides a loophole for overseas voters, who are not required to abide by the law. Griffin is challenging that discrepancy, and one justice, Richard Dietz, has already said that challenge is “quite likely to be meritorious.”
Dietz dissented in the Supreme Court opinion that blocked the NCSBE from certifying the election and said that challenging the other roughly 60,000 votes using a different argument regarding identification was unlikely to succeed.
Griffin’s lawyers appear to have heeded that warning, as they now argue that “dealing with the question of photo identification for overseas voters first, for instance, the Court may be able to moot the rest of the petition.” The filing called the tranche of 5,509 overseas votes without identification the “primary category of protests at issue.”
The Republican asked the court for a “phased” approach to dealing with his various arguments, suggesting they deal with the no-ID overseas ballots first. If those ballots do not turn the election in his favor, then the court should turn to 267 voters who cast ballots but have never lived in North Carolina.
If Griffin still does not prevail after rejecting those two groups, then his filing argues that the court should consider the legitimacy of another 60,273 ballots that were cast by voters who were not properly registered to vote, as they provided no driver’s license or Social Security Number upon registration — as required by law.
The NCSBE is required to respond by Jan. 21.
While this matter is being considered at the state level, the NCSBE has also appealed a U.S. district court decision that remanded the case to state court. The federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the NCSBE’s appeal. Infamous election rigger and far-left lawyer Marc Elias has been called in to assist at the federal level, which has oral arguments set for Jan. 27 in Richmond, Virginia.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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