RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina Supreme Court decision refusing to further accelerate the appeals over an unsettled November election for a seat on the court means an official winner likely won’t be finalized sooner, and the trailing candidate could benefit.
A majority of justices rejected a request by the State Board of Elections to fast-track the case by skipping deliberations at the intermediate-level Court of Appeals and going directly to the state’s highest court.
Thursday’s denial also appears to favor Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who seeks to unseat the Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs and opposed the board’s effort. Republicans hold a majority of seats on the Supreme Court and on the Court of Appeals, where Griffin currently serves.
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Riggs has a 734-vote lead over Griffin from more than 5.5 million ballots cast and recounted in the race. Griffin filed challenges to over 65,000 early or absentee ballots cast that his lawyers have said should be removed from the tally.
Most of the challenged ballots were cast by voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Other votes being challenged were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S., and military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.
While the Associated Press declared over 4,400 winners in the 2024 general election, the North Carolina Supreme Court election is the only race nationally that is still undecided.
Following weeks of briefs and rulings in federal and state courts, a state trial judge on Feb. 7 upheld the state board’s December dismissals of Griffin’s formal protests over those ballots. Griffin appealed Superior Court Judge William Pittman’s decisions to the Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel has set brief-filing deadlines that end in early March.
Lawyers for the state board this week asked that the case be heard by the Supreme Court now, calling the voting issues presented in the case exceptional and a priority for the court to resolve quickly. While Riggs’ attorneys agreed with the board, Griffin’s legal team wrote that Pittman’s one-paragraph orders lacked explanations of his reasoning in contrast to “the robust judicial review that this case deserves.”
With Riggs recusing herself from deliberations, the Supreme Court’s remaining six justices voted 4-2 to deny the election board’s bypass request.
Associate Justice Trey Allen, in writing an opinion supporting the denial order, said if the justices “were to take this case now, we would do so in the absence of any meaningful examination of those claims by a lower court.” Allen is one of the five registered Republicans on the court hearing the case.
GOP member Associate Justice Richard Dietz and Democratic Associate Justice Anita Earls opposed the denial.
“Further delay at this stage continues to erode trust in our elections and calls into question the ability of the legal system to guarantee that fundamental principles of democracy are capable of being recognized and enforced by a fair and impartial judiciary,” Earls wrote in her own dissenting opinion.
Given Thursday’s ruling, should the Court of Appeals panel next overturn Pittman’s dismissal and favor Griffin’s demand that ballots be removed, then the panel’s decision would prevail at the Supreme Court even if the justices deadlocked 3-3. That would be a lower bar had the Supreme Court agreed to bypass the Court of Appeals: then four of the six justices would have been required to overturn Pittman’s decision and side with Griffin.
Griffin’s lawyers have argued that counting the challenged ballots violates state laws or the state constitution. Lawyers for Riggs and the board have said the ballots were cast lawfully and that Griffin failed to comply with formal protest procedures. A board attorney recently said that at least half of the voters that Griffin challenged over driver’s license or Social Security numbers actually did provide one.
Even if state courts ultimately favor Griffin, Riggs has a backstop: a federal appeals court said earlier this month that she can return to federal court to plead her case on federal elections and voting rights laws.
“No matter how long this drags out, I will continue to defend our state and federal Constitutions and North Carolinians’ fundamental freedoms,” Riggs said in a statement after Thursday’s decision.
Griffin, who has recused himself from Court of Appeals deliberations in the case, has declined to comment on legal issues from his protests, saying it would violate the judicial conduct code.
