NC Supreme Court candidate Griffin has gone too far | Opinion
Jefferson Griffin's challenge in the race he lost to Allison Riggs is reminiscent of 'Stop the Steal,' the failed attempt to hand Trump an election. Griffin seeks to throw out votes wholesale.
Are you among the 60,000 North Carolina residents whose votes a Republican judge is trying to throw out? There is a way to check.
A software engineer and town councilman in Apex created a website where it asks, “Is Jefferson Griffin trying to CANCEL your vote?” and you can punch in your name.
Cumberland County residents make up 2,300 of the voters in Griffin’s crosshairs, and in going through the list, I found at least two people I know. I informed one of the women, a small business owner, over Facebook. “I had no idea,” she said. I knew the other woman, a college student, through my sister-in-law, who passed along what Griffin was trying to do with the woman’s vote.
Potential disenfranchisement hits different when it’s someone you know.
Recounts are normal, expected and proper in a close election. The state Board of Elections ran a recount in the razor-thin race for North Carolina Supreme Court, and it upheld that voters in November had picked Allison Riggs, the incumbent, over Jefferson Griffin, who serves on the state Court of Appeals. Riggs beat Griffin by 734 votes out of 5.5 million cast.
Since then, Griffin has taken his claims into a dubious legal realm that has again put North Carolina politics in the national arena, and in a bad way. From the outside, it looks like he is trying to steal this seat. From the inside, it doesn’t look too hot, either.
The bulk of Griffin’s challenges involve voter registrations, where the claim is they do not include a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the Social Security number. This, according to a state elections board lawyer in answer to a reporter whose own vote was challenged.
The problem for Griffin: State law does not require these things for someone to vote. He is clearly hoping the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican advantage over Democrats, will throw out thousands of people’s votes and maybe hand him the election so he can join them and increase their majority.
North Carolina Supreme Court delays certification in Riggs-Griffin election. Is that alarming?
That state Supreme Court has delayed certification of the Riggs-Griffin election so it can consider Griffin’s challenge. That may not tell us anything about whether the justices will uphold his long-shot claims, but some find the development alarming, nevertheless.
That is because this court under Chief Justice Paul Newby has in the past behaved in a way that sure looks partisan. In April 2023, not long after Republicans secured a majority, the court reversed itself on two decisions made when there was a Democratic majority — upholding voter ID requirements and shooting down a claim of partisan redistricting. Both decisions were boosts for the GOP.
Sure, one could say the Democratic majority court also supported its party in the original rulings — but that gives me no additional confidence in the GOP court’s actions when it comes to Griffin.
Let’s be clear: Even if Griffin loses his claim, for him to take it this far casts him in a bad light. Throwing out a vote is an extreme remedy, and judges left, right and center are rightly resistant when plaintiffs ask them to do so.
His effort is reminiscent of “Stop the Steal,” the name given to the series of failed legal challenges in multiple states to hand the 2020 presidential election to Donald Trump over the rightful winner, Joe Biden. Like those efforts, Griffin’s challenge relies on slim legal reasoning and depends on discarding voters’ will in a wholesale fashion.
NC voters Griffin is challenging 'less likely to be white'
There's another similarity to the Stop the Steal lawsuits: Those challenges, because they concentrated on Democratic-leaning urban areas, snared a disproportionate number of Black voters.
The voters Griffin is challenging are "much less likely to be white" and "much more likely" to not identify as a race on their voter files, according to analysis by Chris Cooper, a Western Carolina University professor and NC elections expert. The data also shows challenged voters are "more likely to identify as Hispanic," Cooper wrote.
As it happens, of the two women I know whose votes are being challenged, one is Black, the other of Hispanic descent.
Some of Griffin's fellow conservatives think he's gone too far
Even some of Griffin’s fellow conservatives think he has gone too far. Joshua Peters, who said he voted for Griffin, penned a Jan. 10 column in the Carolina Journal calling on the judge to concede the race. Peters said that he had begun to question Griffin’s “commitment to a conservative foundation in jurisprudence.”
He wrote: “His post-election legal challenge, in my opinion, represents an unprecedented and undignified response to losing an election for the North Carolina Supreme Court.”
“Unprecedented” is right. Four years ago, former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, lost an even tighter race to keep her job against Republican Newby. Just 401 votes separated the two, after a recount. But Beasley conceded.
That is what you do. That is how democracy is supposed to work.
Surely, Griffin must know that if he somehow “wins” this way, his victory and his seat will be tainted? No one will see him the same as his colleagues on the bench who won fair and square, even people who support it from a political perspective.
Call me a cockeyed optimist but I always believe a person can have a change of heart, and maybe Griffin will, and he will drop his lawsuit.
It is never the wrong time to do the right thing. Who better to model such behavior than someone who wishes to issue rulings from our state’s highest court?
Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com.