Things Are Getting Dire in That State Judicial Race the GOP Is Trying to Steal

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In a cowardly unsigned opinion on Friday, two judges on the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in favor of one of their colleagues, Judge Jefferson Griffin, in his quest to overturn an election that he narrowly lost in November.

Republican Judges Fred Gore and Hunter Tyson didn’t throw out the 65,000 ballots and declare Griffin the winner, as he had requested. But they are requiring election officials in a few Democratic counties to notify tens of thousands of voters of problems with their ballots or their registration. If the voters fail to fix the issues within 15 days, the ballots they cast in November—in accordance with all the rules in place at the time—will not be counted.

Given that Griffin lost by only 734 votes, this ruling could easily lead to his being declared the winner. His opponent, incumbent Allison Riggs, will appeal. The state Supreme Court could review the decision. But if the high court splits 3–3 (with Riggs recused), the Court of Appeals ruling will stand. The high court declined in February to overturn the election results, but three GOP justices signed on to an opinion full of election denialism that implied that the challenged votes should be discarded.

In a dissent on Friday, Judge Toby Hampson calls out the majority for its “mass disenfranchisement” and criticizes Griffin for trying “to retroactively change the rules which applied to the election in hopes those changes will alter the result and lead to [Griffin’s] being judicially declared the winner of an election he would otherwise lose.” Hampson notes that “every single voter” challenged by Griffin followed the rules.

Griffin’s arguments to change the rules were rejected by courts or election officials before the election. He argues that tens of thousands of voter registrations are invalid, because they don’t include the legally required Social Security or driver’s license numbers.

Now Gore and Tyson are requiring all those voters to provide that information to election officials within two weeks, in order for the votes they legally cast to be counted. They’re retroactively changing the election rules in a handful of blue counties in the hopes of giving their colleague a high-court seat that he lost.

The court is also mandating that military and overseas voters in heavily Democratic Guilford County provide a copy of their photo IDs, even though the voter-ID statute doesn’t apply to them. Gore is a former member of the National Guard, and he ran a “joint campaign” with Griffin and other Republicans in 2020. He’ll be on the ballot again in 2028.

Hampson notes that the majority created the 15-day cure process out of whole cloth, and he concludes by accusing his colleagues of “legislating from the bench.” He also points out that if the state throws out these ballots but not others, it will violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Griffin is asking the state to treat military voters in Guilford County differently, and he wants to throw out only absentee ballots from voters with incomplete registration, not in-person votes.

These equal protection concerns could finally lead the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene and stop the Republicans’ blatant election theft. A panel of 4^th Circuit judges, in a party-line decision in February, declined to intervene. But the judges left open the door to intervening if federal issues arise, and they could have the final say.

The circuit court has put a stop to voter suppression in North Carolina before. It should do it again. North Carolina’s appellate courts are controlled by partisan hacks who will do whatever it takes to maintain Republican power. The federal courts can’t let them get away with this.