NC Supreme Court race between Riggs, Griffin remains uncertified

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Jen Baddour volunteered as a poll greeter on the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus during November's election, where a bell was rung at the polling site for anyone voting for the first time.

She told young voters there, "Listen, you're not going to see or hear the fireworks when you put your ballot in to be counted, but you will feel them in your heart," Baddour recalled to CNN.

Now, she is one of roughly 65,000 voters - including many affected by Hurricane Helene - whose ballots Republicans are trying to toss as they deploy a playbook that had been prepared when all eyes were on President Donald Trump's election campaign.

The GOP is trying to overturn a closely watched North Carolina Supreme Court election where two recounts show Democratic Justice Allison Riggs holding on to her seat, with 734 votes putting her ahead of her GOP opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin.

As they've pressed forward in multiple legal forums, Republicans have not put forward evidence that voter fraud occurred in the election. For the vast majority of the ballots being challenged, they're instead relying on what likely amounts to clerical errors by election officials to argue that those votes should be thrown out. They're also challenging a few thousand overseas ballots, including ballots cast by military members and their families abroad, and for some ballots, they're using arguments that were rejected by courts in pre-election court battles in the state.

Critics warn that if the gambit is successful, it will set a new standard for throwing out elections based on technicalities that are no fault of the voters.

The GOP approach is "undemocratic" and "radical," said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney and election law expert who, from his perch leading the Center for Election Innovation & Research, advises state election officials of both parties.

"It goes beyond almost any lawsuit that I've seen before in challenging an election," Becker said.

Baddour, the Chapel Hill resident, has been registered to vote since 1992, having been born and lived most of her life in North Carolina. But, due to an error by election officials, the commonly used registration form did not require until 2023 certain identification numbers that were mandated by law. It's possible Baddour did not provide those ID numbers, or if she did, the numbers may not have been recorded when she registered.

"I would have easily given it," Baddour said. "I voted many times, and I've updated my record many times. No one has ever said to me, you know, 'Give this information.'"

'A different agenda other than protecting the voting process'

The origins of Griffin's legal challenge can be traced back to the digging of Carol Snow, a North Carolina woman who began researching state election policy in 2021.

"I started out as a skeptic," she said in an email to CNN. "After a few years of research and analysis of NC's data and election law, I'm now a full-blown grade A bona fide Election Denier."

Using a public records request, Snow surfaced data in 2023 showing that the registration data of 225,000 voters had neither a driver's license number nor the last four digits of their Social Security number. A 2004 state law requires election officials collect at least one of those ID numbers.

Snow flagged for the state election board that its registration form was failing to collect the required ID numbers. Election officials updated the form and other registration materials after she filed administrative complaints, but the state election board rebuffed her calls for election officials to obtain the ID information from each of those voters.

Before the election, the GOP brought a lawsuit that pointed to her administrative complaints in challenging those voters' eligibility to vote, but judges dealt Republicans legal setbacks, denying them relief before the election.

A new version of the claim has come to life with Griffin's post-election protest. Along with two other buckets of challenges, his lawsuit targets 60,000 voters with so-called "incomplete" registrations who cast absentee or early-in person ballots, both categories of ballots that can be retrieved and segregated from the count.

Women make up a disproportionate number of the voters challenged for missing the ID numbers, according to data obtained by a public records request by the state Democratic Party.

Part of that dynamic, Democrats and election officials believe, is because of a mismatch between a woman's maiden name and married name when the ID number she provided is run against other government databases. If the names and numbers don't align, the ID number is not entered into her registration record.

The voters caught in the middle include people who have voted and lived in the state for decades, who have served in elected office themselves, and who overcame the destruction of Hurricane Helene to exercise their franchise. Republicans are even challenging the ballots cast by Riggs' parents.

"These voters did not do anything wrong," Riggs told CNN. "They are long time - in many cases, lifetime - voters. There is no question of their identity."

Copland Rudolph, a challenged voter who lives in Asheville and whose family ties to that area of the state date back to the 1700s, looked up her old registration file, which confirmed she had provided her social security number, she told CNN. She told CNN that she saw names on the challenge list of people currently involved in the Hurricane Helene response efforts.

"For us to have to go back, and re-look at our vote, and even deal with this issue when we have years ahead of us of recovery is ... tone deaf by the people filing this challenge," she said.

Rani Dasi, a Chapel Hill voter on Griffin's challenge list, noted in an interview the photo ID she was required to show to vote this year under a newly enacted North Carolina law.

"The fact that ID was required should eliminate any confusion about who's eligible or not to vote," Dasi, who also had her credentials verified when she was elected three times to serve on the local school board, said. "This is something that has a different agenda other than protecting the voting process."

A spokesperson for the North Carolina GOP placed the blame on the state board of elections for being "completely uninterested" in fixing issues with voters' registration data that Republicans and others brought to its attention before the election.

"It's a factor of the long-term failure of the state board of elections," said the spokesperson, Matt Mercer, while noting its Democratic-held majority, "that has led us to this point."

(In response to CNN's inquiries, Griffin's lawyers referred CNN to the NC GOP spokesperson.)

Overseas ballots targeted as well

In court filings with the North Carolina Supreme Court, Griffin has told the court that it need not throw out those 60,000 votes - if the two other buckets of ballot challenges he's bringing put him ahead of Riggs in the vote count first.

The first challenge category Griffin wants the state court to consider are 5,509 overseas ballots he claims are invalid because the voters did not provide copies of their photo ID.

The agency regulation that established that those voters weren't subject to the state photo ID requirement went through a notice and comment process, the state board has noted, during which the state GOP raised no objection for the photo ID exemption, even as it weighed in on other aspects of the rule.

"What the state board did does not have the superseding authority over what the people voted on and what was implemented in state law," Mercer, the GOP spokesperson, said, referring to the photo ID requirement.

Notably, Griffin did not bring this type of challenge statewide. Instead, he challenged these voters only in the four counties that all lean Democratic. Mercer told CNN that only those counties were targeted with election protests because only their data was available at the time the judge's protests were filed.

In court filings, Griffin said that if those ballots don't put him over the top, the next category of ballots that should be tossed are the votes of overseas Americans whom he's dubbed "Never Residents." They're overseas voters, often children of expats abroad, who never lived in North Carolina themselves but have the right to vote in the state under North Carolina law because their parents were residents.

That argument was put forward by Republicans in a pre-election lawsuit that was rejected by both a state trial judge and appeals court.

Dual legal tracks

The North Carolina Supreme Court - which has a 5-2 Republican majority - paused certification of Riggs' win earlier this month, but on Wednesday, declined Griffin's request that it rule on his challenges directly, instead sending his case down for lower state courts to consider first.

Still, Chief Justice Paul Newby - a Republican whom Griffin has described as a mentor - wrote a concurrence seemingly defending Griffin's efforts, writing that the case was "not about deciding the outcome of an election "and that "there is nothing anti-democratic about filing an election protest."

(Riggs is recusing from the matter; one Republican justice joined the remaining Democrat on the court in dissenting from the decision to pause certification.)

Riggs and the state board, meanwhile, have sought to move the case to federal court, where they can argue that federal law forbids the "the mass disenfranchisement" Griffin is seeking, as Riggs put it in a legal brief last week. After a US district judge remanded the case back to the state supreme court, the Democrats appealed that ruling, and the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments next Monday on whether the dispute belongs in a federal forum.

No matter what the next legal developments, it appears likely that the court fight will drag on for months. Democratic Justice Anita Earls warned in a partial dissent Wednesday that by keeping the certification on hold, the state supreme court may have opened a "Pandora's box."

"If any losing candidate can make any sort of argument about votes in the election, no matter how frivolous, and automatically receive a court-ordered stay on appeal, preventing the winning candidate from being certified, nothing stops litigious losers from preventing duly elected persons from taking office for months or longer," she wrote.

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