Almost six months after the elections of the Supreme Court of North Carolina were held, the contest has not yet been called and a winner has not yet been certified.
That is almost completely due to a flood of litigation of the republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who demanded for more than 65,000 votes to be expelled after being chosen, triggering an extensive legal saga that is testing some of the strongest precedents of the electoral law. The effort, if successful, could be more than enough to change the results of the elections, since Griffin currently follows Democratic Title Allison Riggs for approximately 700 votes.
But even if the impulse finally falls short, Griffin critics, which include members of both parties, say that it could have lasting consequences and pave the way for more candidates to pursue challenges, regardless of how legally questionable, to the results of the elections decided by narrow margins.
“This is clearly an attempt to manipulate the law and courts to change an electoral result by changing the rules after the elections were held,” said Ann Webb, director of policies of the North Carolina Chapter of Common Cause, a government surveillance group.
Griffin’s arguments, Webb, said: “It requires that the courts say:” Yes, it is fine to ask us to change the rules after the elections are held. “And that is where we really see something different and something scary, because there is nothing that prevents other candidates from any party in the future to use that same strategy and point to this case.”
In an interview, Riggs described Griffin’s legal approach as “insidious” and warned that it would probably be imitated if it is successful.
“Today is a problem of North Carolina, but tomorrow is a problem of Michigan and Arizona and Georgia,” he said, referring to other very divided battlefield states.
Even some North Carolina Republicans have asked Griffin to throw the towel.
“I wanted the Republican judge to win because his philosophy aligns more with me,” said the former governor of the Republican Party Pat McCrory to the local media ABC11 this week. “He was defeated.”
“Cabas with the rules before the elections. It’s like changing a penalty call after the Super Bowl ends. You don’t do that,” McCrory said, added that voters “voted depending on the set of rules.”
In addition, groups led by Republicans are publishing ads in the state asking Griffin to end their litigation.
A Griffin spokesman did not answer the NBC News questions for this story.
In an email, the spokesman of the North Carolina Republican party, Matt Mercer, accused the Democrats of not being able to “argue about the merits of Judge Griffin’s case because they know that following the law is not controversial.”
“If the Democrats were sincere, they would simply admit that they do not really care about honest elections and are only interested in partisan results,” Mercer added. The North Carolina Republican Party was associated with Griffin in its original litigation in the state judicial system.
Months of litigation
Riggs, who was appointed member of the State Supreme Court in 2023, emerged after the day of the elections last November below Griffin, a state appeals judge. A complete machine count, as well as a partial count of the race race, showed Riggs leading Griffin for 734 votes of 5.5 million votes cast.
Subsequently, Griffin presented legal challenges, backed by the North Carolina Republican Party, throughout the state, claiming that more than 65,000 people had voted illegally. The claims focused on three voter categories: the voters that Griffin’s lawyers affirmed had no driver’s licenses or social security numbers in their voter registration records; foreign voters who have not lived in North Carolina; and voters abroad who could not provide photos identification with their tickets.
Since then, a series of nuanced and complex judicial decisions have continued from the state courts of North Carolina, including the Supreme Court, the bank to which the winner of this election will be joined, and the federal courts. (Griffin and Riggs have retired from the matter when the problem occurred before the courts in which they attend).
The last development occurred on Tuesday, when a Federal Court of Appeals temporarily blocked the electoral officials of North Carolina to advance with a period that would allow thousands of military and foreign voters to “cure” their tickets after the Supreme Court of North Carolina had ordered.
In that decision earlier this month, the Supreme Court of the State ruled that some 60,000 of the votes in question cannot be thrown, but that others could be if the minor errors were not fixed, which means that these voters should demonstrate their eligibility for electoral officials.
Long -term ramifications
Critics of the Griffin strategy say that their arguments contradict several long -standing precedents in the electoral law, and regardless of whether they succeed, they could be used in future attempts to cancel nearby races.
One of these precedents is the notion that the rules of an election must be established before the vote occurs, since Griffin seeks to throw thousands of votes cast by the voters who followed the letter of the law.
Griffin’s critics also point out that only he is trying to make them tickets, not any of the other Republican candidates who competed in state elections in November.
“Republicans choose to challenge voters who did nothing wrong with” said North Carolina Democratic Party, Anderson Clayton, in a recent call with journalists. “If they really believe there has been electoral negligence, why don’t all Republicans challenge the same electoral results as Jefferson Griffin is currently?”
Meanwhile, more than 200 judges, government officials, lawyers and legal professors, including some Republicans, signed a letter to Griffin last month declaring: “The arguments he has advanced asked our judicial system to change the current rules for the 2024 elections after it has followed its course.”
“If you succeed, tens of thousands of voters will lose their voice after they voted,” they wrote. “For the sake of our judicial system, we ask you to finish your litigation now.”
In one of the last presentations of the Griffin Legal Team in the Federal Court, their lawyers rejected the argument that he wanted to change “the electoral rules after the elections.”
“That is not what the courts said. They argued that the” simple language “of the State Constitution prohibited voters who had never resided in North Carolina to vote in the state elections,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote. “And the Supreme Court of North Carolina determined that the State Electoral Code required that voters abroad provide an identification of photos with their ballots. As part of its remedy, the court provided a 30 -day cure period for those voters to fix the defect.”
Griffin critics recognize the value of legal remedies after an election, but argue that they should have challenged the rules long before the elections if I was worried about them.
“It is important to have an exhaust valve in the form of a post -choice [legal] Challenges: if there are real errors, or if the law has been badly applied, or there is evidence of fraud, ”said Webb, on common cause.
But in this case, he said, the Republicans are “using the exhaust valve to bring a challenge against parts of the law that were there and available to be challenged at any time in recent years.”
