NC Court of Appeals Orders Recount of 65,000 Ballots in Contested 2024 State Supreme Court Election

The results of a contested North Carolina Supreme Court race could flip in favor of the Republican after the state’s Court of Appeals ruled Friday that tens of thousands of votes must be recounted and verified.

Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin trails appointed Democrat incumbent Justice Allison Riggs by just 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast in the 2024 election, the Carolina Journal reported.

Griffin challenged more than 65,000 ballots from Democrat-leaning voters who lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number in their registration records.

Riggs has referred to Griffins challenge as an attempt “to disenfranchise more than 65,000 voters,” and is raising money for her campaign to keep her seat through the Democrats’ corrupt funding platform Act Blue, which encourages illegal election contributions, according to a recently released House Judiciary Committee investigation.

The Court ordered that the “Incomplete Voter Registration” voters be given 15 days to provide documentation to election workers proving they are eligible voters.

The ballots of those who fail to prove their eligibility after 15 days will be thrown out, according to the decision.

“The post-election protest process preserves the fundamental right to vote in free elections ‘on equal terms,’” the majority stated in the opinion. “This right is violated when ‘votes are not accurately counted [because] [unlawful] [ ] ballots are included in the election results.’ The inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively “disenfranchises”’ lawful voters.”

Judges John Tyson and Fred Gore, both Republicans, came down on the side of election integrity,  while Judge Tobias Hampson, a Democrat, dissented. The panel heard oral arguments in the case last month.

“Based on precedent from the Supreme Court of North Carolina, this Court could order that those voters are without a remedy to cure their incomplete registrations,” the majority opinion stated. “However, because the Board and the county boards did not comply with their statutory obligations to notify these voters who have ‘provide[d] enough information on the form to enable the county board to identify and contact the voter’ of the information defect in their registrations, we conclude these voters should be allowed a period of fifteen (15) business days after notice to cure their defective registrations.”

The majority however stated that the lack of a photo ID in an election ballot was a “curable deficiency.”

“Upon remand, the Board is instructed to immediately direct the county boards in all one hundred counties to expeditiously identify the challenged ‘Incomplete Voter Registration’ voters and notify said voters of their registration defects, to allow said voters fifteen (15) business days from the mailing of the notice to cure the defect, and upon verification to include in the count of this challenged election the votes of those voters who timely cure their registration defects and to omit from the final count the votes of those voters who fail to timely cure their registration defects.”

Griffin also challenged the ballots of more than 5,500 overseas voters who provided no photo identification. “[T]heir ballots have not been properly cast,” Tyson and Gore determined. “[T]his Court could order that those voters are without a remedy to cure their failure to comply with the photo ID requirement.”

Griffin found an additional 267 voters who have never even lived in North Carolina. “[W]e conclude these purported voters are not eligible to vote in North Carolina, non-federal elections, and the votes cast by these purported voters are not to be included in the final count in the 2024 election,” the majority decided.

Those 267 votes would be removed from the statewide total under the court’s ruling.

According to the Journal, “an appeal could take the case to the full Appeals Court, where Republican judges outnumber Democrats, 11-3, with Griffin recused from the case.”

Or the case could head back to the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 5-1 majority with Riggs recused. In two earlier decisions in the case, Republican Justice Richard Dietz has dissented from the majority. The court voted 4-2 in those instances.

Court filings have suggested that parties in the case anticipate a possible 3-3 split among Supreme Court justices, which would leave the Appeals Court’s ruling as the final decision in the dispute.

Currently five of the justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court are Republicans are two (including Riggs) are Democrats.