A North Carolina Judge Won Two Recounts. Republicans Are Still Trying to Overturn Her Election.

Allison Riggs speaks at a primary election night party in Raleigh on March 5, 2024. Karl B DeBlaker/AP

After trailing by more than 10,000 votes on election night, Democratic North Carolina State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs pulled off an unexpected victory by 734 votes after absentee and provisional ballots were counted and the results were affirmed by two recounts, including a hand count completed on Tuesday. “Let this race serve as a reminder that every vote counts,” said North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton.

But the election has yet to be certified because Riggs’ GOP opponent, Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, has challenged the validity of more than 60,000 ballots, including those of Riggs’ parents.

“The scale of this should be deeply troubling to anyone who has any respect for the rule of law,” Riggs told me on Wednesday. “With 60,000 people, it is everyone’s friend, it’s everyone’s family member, it’s everyone’s neighbor. There’s no one who doesn’t know someone on that list.”

Griffin’s campaign has claimed ballots were wrongly counted from people who failed to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered to vote, had a felony conviction, died before Election Day, or voted overseas without proper identification. However, the voter challenges have ensnared many legitimate voters, including at least 21 local officials. During a hearing before the state board of elections on Wednesday, Griffin’s attorney couldn’t point to a single example of an ineligible voter on their challenge list.

Griffin’s campaign also appears to be targeting certain Democratic-leaning constituencies; Black voters were twice as likely as white voters to have their ballots contested, found the Raleigh News & Observer, and voters aged 18 to 25 were the largest group of challenged voters.

Ella Kromm, a recent college graduate, was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, and had hoped to cast a mail-in ballot before moving to Spain to teach English at an elementary school. But her ballot did not arrive in time so she was forced to submit her vote while overseas. Her ballot is now being challenged. “This is a nonviolent version of January 6,” her mother, Melissa Price Kromm, a longtime pro-democracy advocate, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The State Board of Elections voted 3–2 to reject the voter challenges on Wednesday, but Griffin’s campaign can appeal in state court. That raises the prospect that the 5-2 Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court could intervene in a race involving one of its own justices, overturn the election, and in so doing expand their partisan majority.

“Do I have fear? Absolutely,” Clayton said on Tuesday. “What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve.”

The stakes are so high because a Riggs victory, while preserving the GOP’s 5-2 advantage on North Carolina’s top court, gives Democrats a shot at retaking the court before the end of the decade. That would allow them to oversee the state’s redistricting process in 2031. To accomplish that they will have to hold the seat of Democratic Justice Anita Earls, who like Riggs was a longtime voting rights lawyer before joining the bench (they worked together at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice), and then unseat two of three Republican justices up for re-election in 2028—no easy feat.

“We’ve knocked over the first domino that we need to for Democrats to take back the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2028,” Riggs said. “It’s not going to be easy, but we know what we need to do going forward.”

Before the 2020 election, Democrats held a 6-1 majority on the state supreme court. But Republicans flipped four seats in 2020 and 2022. They were helped by GOP efforts to overturn public financing for judicial races and make state supreme court races partisan contests.

The Republican-controlled court, in turn, boosted the power of the Republican-controlled legislature by issuing favorable rulings for them. In April 2023, the court reversed a prior court decision striking down the legislature’s gerrymandered congressional and state legislative maps, upheld a felon disenfranchisement law, and reinstated a strict voter ID measure. The gerrymandering decision allowed the legislature to draw heavily skewed new maps last year that entrenched GOP control at the state level and allowed Republicans to pick up three US House seats in November, which in turn helped the GOP maintain control of the chamber.

Though Trump carried North Carolina, Democrats won six statewide elections in November, a rare bright spot for the party. The legislature responded to these victories by convening a lame-duck session two weeks after the election, ostensibly to provide relief for victims of Hurricane Helene, and then blindsided Democrats with a brazenly undemocratic bill stripping top Democrats of power. It prevented the incoming Democratic governor from appointing a majority of members on state and county election boards, prohibited the Democratic attorney general from filing lawsuits that were at odds with the GOP legislature, contained numerous provisions making it harder to vote, and intensified GOP influence over the courts.

Outgoing Democratic Gov. Cooper vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode his veto on Wednesday, just before Republicans were set to lose their legislative supermajority in the new year.

The law, had it been in effect in November, would have directly impacted the state supreme court race. One provision, which slashed the amount of time given to county election boards to tabulate provisional and absentee ballots to 2.5 days instead of 10 days, would have prevented Riggs from winning her election, according to Common Cause North Carolina.

The GOP also shifted the authority to appoint a majority of members on state and county election boards from the governor’s office to the state auditor, who is a Republican for the first time in more than a decade. Had Republicans controlled a majority on local election boards they might have been able to reject enough votes in Riggs’s race to swing the election.

“I’m a former voting rights attorney,” Riggs said, “and I know from personal experience that when you have tight elections, voter suppression is real and does work on the margins of those tight elections.”

The legislative power grab and the mass voter challenges show the lengths Republicans will go to nullify votes cast for Democrats in the state. “What’s happening today in North Carolina is a calculated assault on the very foundations of our democracy,” says Price Kromm, executive director of North Carolina for the People Action. “In one building, cloaked in the language of disaster recovery, but designed to make major changes to our democracy, Senate Bill 382 is a glaring example of legislative leadership more interested in consolidating power than in serving the people of North Carolina. In the next building, Republican Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin is trying to intimidate, harass, and disenfranchise voters in an election protest designed to overturn an election.”

This twin assault on democracy underscores the long-term importance of Democrats regaining control over the state supreme court. Given the likelihood that the legislature will pass another set of gerrymandered maps at the beginning of the next decade, the top court could be the only entity that can stop them and end twenty years of GOP legislative control.