A guide to the ongoing N.C. Supreme Court election dispute

In the early hours of Nov. 6, 2024, Democratic Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs and Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin were locked in a close race for a seat on the N.C. Supreme Court. 

After all votes had been counted, Riggs was leading by only 734 votes. 

Three months later, the election still hasn't been certified due to ongoing legal protests, recounts and questions surrounding voter eligibility. 

On Nov. 18, Griffin sued the North Carolina State Board of Elections for failing to provide him with public election data with enough time to file protests regarding election results. 

Then, on Nov. 19, Griffin requested that the Board conduct a recount. The Board announced the same day that it would conduct a statewide machine recount, which ended up confirming the results and the margin of 734 votes. 

Griffin also filed a protest against the election, alleging that more than 60,000 votes should be discounted on the basis that these voters did not include their driver’s license numbers or social security numbers with their voter registration. 

According to a response by NCSBE Executive Director Karen Bell to a complaint against the Help America Vote Act, which standardizes the national voting process, social security numbers and driver’s license numbers may be missing from voter registration profiles due to database entry errors or variations in voters’ names. 

Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, said supreme court races in North Carolina are historically very close. They said Republican Chief Justice Paul Newby won his race in 2020 by 401 votes.

“Asking for a recount in a close election is normal,” Owen said. “Mass challenging voters is not a normal legal process.”

Griffin's lawyers did not respond to The Daily Tar Heel's multiple requests for comment.

Ryan Bonifay, who was listed on the Nov. 19 election protest as a witness, said he was commissioned by one of Griffin’s lawyers, Phil Thomas, to compile the data and arrange a list of contested voters. Bonifay is a senior director of data and analytics at ColdSpark, a political consulting firm. 

“The list that I put together were lists that came from public records requests from the state board of elections, and that the attorneys had made, and then I matched them to the state board of elections state voter file and the absentee file from the state board of elections,” Bonifay said. 

He said he didn't place any filters on demographic, geographic or partisan data.

“If I was told to put any kind of filter on who was matched, I wouldn’t have done the project,” Bonifay said. 

Griffin’s protest also alleges that some ballots were cast by people who died before election day, as well as by felons. 

“[Griffin] also contested every vote cast by anyone overseas in the military on the basis that they didn’t provide photo voter ID even though the state had — in advance — ruled that that wasn’t required for overseas voters,” Gerry Cohen, a Wake County Board of Elections member, said. 

Cohen said voters who completed absentee ballots were required to provide their driver’s license numbers or social security information to request their ballots. 

On Dec. 3, the Board announced it would conduct a second partial hand-to-eye recount — as requested by Griffin — which again upheld the initial election results, with Griffin gaining 56 votes and Riggs gaining 70.

Patrick Gannon, the Board's public information officer, said partial hand-to-eye recount results can yield different vote counts than machine recounts because voters sometimes complete their ballots incorrectly, including not completely filling in the oval next to a candidate’s name.

Later, in a Dec. 10 press release, the Board announced that Griffin could not order a third recount because he did not pick up at least 35 more votes than Riggs in the partial hand recount. 

The Board issued an order the next day dismissing Griffin’s protests, stating that the Board concluded there was insufficient evidence that violation of election law, irregularity or misconduct occurred in the election. Then, Griffin appealed directly to the state supreme court. 

“The State Board of Elections got the case moved to federal court because Judge Griffin was alleging violations of federal law relating to voter registration," Cohen said.

Griffin filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against the Board on Dec. 23, which would prevent the Board from certifying the election results until the lawsuit is resolved. The state supreme court issued a stay on Jan. 7, blocking the board from certifying the results. 

On Jan. 5, Griffin filed a motion to return the case to state court. The motion alleged that the federal court did not have proper jurisdiction over the case.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit scheduled oral arguments for Jan. 27, but the order from the federal court didn’t order the state Supreme Court to halt its proceedings. 

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