Raleigh, North Carolina — The North Carolina Supreme Court determined Friday that tens of thousands of cast ballots contested by the trailing contender in November’s unresolved race for a seat on the court must be counted.
The judgement largely overturns an intermediate-level Court of Appeals panel’s verdict last week, which favoured Republican Jefferson Gryphon, who trails Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs.
However, a majority of judges — all registered Republicans — upheld the lower court’s ruling that more ballots from two other categories that Gryphon contested were incorrectly included in the tally. According to the court’s ruling judgement, some of these voters — potentially thousands who serve in the military or live overseas — would still have the opportunity to submit a photo identity or an ID exception form for their preferred race in order to be counted.
The Supreme Court’s order is unlikely to fully determine the close election between Gryphon and Riggs, who leads Gryphon by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast. It is the country’s only 2024 election that has yet to be decided.
Riggs goes to federal court
It’s also unclear whether the pending ballots that could be removed from the count could swing the outcome in Griffin’s favour, who is currently a Court of Appeals judge. Gryphon did not sit on the three-judge panel whose majority ruled in his favour last week, and Riggs did not take part in the Supreme Court’s proceedings.
Riggs’ attorneys filed a request late Friday in U.S. District Court in Raleigh, asking a judge to grant an injunction prohibiting the state appeals court findings from being implemented immediately.
Riggs and the State Board of Elections, which had previously rejected Griffin’s formal protests of over 65,000 ballots in three categories, had indicated that if the justices agreed with Gryphon, they would return to federal court to potentially plead violations of federal election and voting rights laws.
Mistakes cannot result in cancelled ballots
The largest category of challenged voters — almost 60,000 — were ballots cast last fall by people who have been registered to vote since 2004, but whose records do not include a driver’s licence number or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
According to Friday’s majority ruling, the Court of Appeals erred when it declared that these ballots should not have been counted. That’s because, according to the ruling, the State Board of Elections, not the voters, is to fault for failing to gather those numerical IDs correctly for years. These voters ultimately confirmed their identities by complying with the state’s new picture ID law, and longstanding legal precedent holds that such errors by election workers cannot result in cast ballots being cancelled, according to the order.
“Accordingly, we cannot agree with the Court of Appeals that the Board erred by counting their ballots,” the judge’s order states. If the Court of Appeals’ verdict on registrations had been sustained, it would have given these voters about three weeks to supply identification numbers that, if validated, would have resulted in their ballots being tallied.
More time to ‘cure’ ballots
The majority of the six justices involved in the case declined to change the majority of the Court of Appeals’ finding that concluded ballots from a category of military or foreign voters who did not present copies of photo identification or ID exception forms were invalid. However, instead of providing these voters 15 business days to furnish an ID or form to remain eligible, the prevailing ruling set a “cure” deadline of 30 calendar days.
And the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeals’ judgement that those in the third category — perhaps hundreds of overseas voters who have never lived in the United States — were ineligible to vote under state residency regulations and must have their votes deleted from the total.
Attorneys representing Riggs and the board have stated that the votes contested by Gryphon were legitimately cast by voters under the November election rules and should be counted.
Reaction to the ruling
Riggs stated in a news release that, while she was pleased that the justices overturned a significant portion of the Court of Appeals decision, she would not give up “in my fight to protect the fundamental freedoms for which our military service members and their families have sacrificed so much.”
Gryphon campaign spokesperson Paul Shumaker stated that Friday’s decision was “consistent with what we asked in our initial filing.”
Associate Justice Anita Earls, the only Democrat among the justices present on Friday, delivered a nearly 40-page scathing opinion. While agreeing that cancelling ballots based on registration issues would have been incorrect, Earls ruled that the resulting decision, if upheld, “compels unequal treatment of North Carolina voters and infringes on their state constitutional right to vote.”
In another opinion, Republican Associate Justice Richard Dietz argued that the courts should have agreed to conduct a thorough study of the appeal before declaring Griffin’s arguments could not be used to change a previous election. Prior to Friday’s judgement, the Supreme Court heard no oral arguments.