Here’s the latest in Jefferson Griffin’s efforts to steal an NC Supreme Court seat from Justice Allison Riggs

More than two months after the 2024 elections ended, North Carolina is still without a seventh member of the state Supreme Court even though incumbent Justice Allison Riggs won her race against Judge Jefferson Griffin — and it will be at least several more weeks before the race can even be certified.

Earlier this week, the NC Supreme Court ruled to prevent the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) from certifying Riggs’ victory over Griffin. The state high court’s decision was just the latest plot twist in Griffin’s attempt to steal the election from Riggs.

How We Got Here

Where we are today is due to a series of counts, recounts and legal challenges. Here’s a refresher on how we got here:

Following a statewide canvass, a statewide machine recount and a partial hand-to-eye recount that confirmed Riggs’ victory by 734 votes, Griffin refused to concede. Instead, he filed hundreds of legal challenges across all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, claiming that tens of thousands of people voted illegally.

Griffin has argued that 60,000 legitimate votes should be thrown out because those voters’ registrations don’t include their driver’s license number and/or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Griffin’s claim was rejected by the NCSBE by a 3-2 vote, but that wasn’t the end of his efforts.

Following the NCSBE’s decision, he sued and asked the state Supreme Court, which currently has a 5 to 2 Republican majority, to intervene. The defendants quickly moved the case to federal court where it was assigned to U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of Donald Trump, for consideration. Myers previously rejected a joint effort by the state and national Republican parties to remove 225,000 people from the voter rolls using the same argument Griffin is now using. Griffin requested that Myers issue an injunction to stop elections officials from certifying Riggs’ win.

Although Myers had previously ruled against this very same argument, he issued an order to send Griffin’s case back to state court.

The NCSBE and Riggs filed a notice of appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday evening. On Tuesday, in a 4-2 ruling (Riggs recused herself from the case), four Republicans on the state Supreme Court blocked state elections officials from certifying Riggs’ win. Republican Justice Richard Dietz broke with his GOP colleagues and joined Justice Anita Earls in dissenting.

In his dissent, Dietz wrote:

“Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules — and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules — invites incredible mischief. It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections.”

Where The Case Stands Now

On Wednesday, Riggs and Griffin submitted filings in federal court concerning their race. Riggs urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to take the case from the state Supreme Court and rule in her favor before February, the earliest the state Supreme Court could hear arguments. Griffin’s legal filing asked federal courts to drop the case and let the state Supreme Court decide.

Pending any rulings from the federal courts, the state Supreme Court’s decision will allow justices to hear Griffin’s challenge. The court’s majority opinion included a schedule for both sides to file all their arguments with the Supreme Court before the end of January.

What You Can Do

If you believe that it’s time for Jefferson Griffin to accept reality and concede the race, click here to send an email and let him know.