Republicans Are Stealing a North Carolina Judicial Race. They Won’t Stop There.

On April 1, Republicans and Elon Musk decisively lost their bid to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. But three days later the GOP came closer than ever to overturning the election of a Democratic justice to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

On April 4, two Republican judges on the North Carolina state court of appeals issued an extraordinary ruling tossing out more than 60,000 votes challenged by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who trails Democratic justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in the last uncalled race of the November 2024 elections. Two recounts affirmed Riggs’ victory, but instead of accepting that outcome, Griffin and his allies on the bench have followed Donald Trump’s 2020 Big Lie playbook to build support for invalidating the election. The key difference is, this time, Republicans could actually succeedin changing the rules for an election that has already occurred to flip the result. It’s January 6 without the insurrection, or if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Trump’s bogus election challenge.

The decision to overturn the election, if upheld, will have ramifications far beyond North Carolina. It will give Republicans a playbook for how to overturn future ones, institutionalizing election denial within the party at a time when democracy is under threat in so many escalating ways.

“This does not just affect North Carolina,” Riggs told Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. “This is like dropping a match in a really dry forest. And if we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

Like Trump, who sought to overturn the votes of large urban centers in key swing states in 2020, Griffin has cherrypicked the type of ballots he wants thrown out.

He’s specifically challenged the eligibility of 60,000 voters with incomplete voter registration records, such as a missing driver’s license or Social Security number. But those registrations were incomplete only because that information was not required at the time or did not appear in state databases because of clerical errors. All of those voters showed identification when voting in 2024. And all of them voted by mail or during early voting, a group that is disproportionately nonwhite, young, and less likely to be registered Republicans. His list of challenged ballots included example after example of lawful voters—including Riggs’ own parents.

“The scale of this should be deeply troubling to anyone who has any respect for the rule of law,” Riggs told me after the election. “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.”

“If we let this kind of anti-democratic effort take hold, we will not be able to contain it. So this is a fight for the very soul of democracy.”

The second group of ballots Griffin challenged—and the court ruled should be thrown out—came from voters who lived overseas, including members of the military. Even though Griffin voted that way twice as a member of the Army National Guard, he said those ballots should not count because they did not show strict forms of photo ID when submitting their votes, even though the State Board of Elections specifically exempted overseas voters from the state’s new voter ID law, which went into effect for the 2024 cycle. The election board unanimously rejected Griffin’s effort to invalidate those ballots during a hearing in December.

Griffin contested the votes of overseas voters only in four heavily Democratic counties where Riggs won an average of 65.5 percent of votes. It was akin to Trump asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2020 to throw out 221,000 ballots only in the counties encompassing Milwaukee and Madison, which the court rejected. “This calculated challenge to voters in just four Democratic-leaning counties would pose a clear equal protection problem under the US Constitution,” Riggs wrote in a legal brief.

The last group of ballots Griffin challenged, and the court invalidated, came from 267 North Carolina residents who have never lived in the state but whose parents were eligible North Carolina voters, such as military members or religious missioners, before leaving the United States.

The Republican judges on the court of appeals voted to reject these 60,000-plus votes because “the inclusion of even one unlawful ballot in a vote total dilutes the lawful votes and ‘effectively ‘disenfranchises’ lawful voters,” they wrote.

But perhaps the most galling part of Griffin’s challenge is that he hasn’t uncovered a single instance of an ineligible voter casting a ballot. He just doesn’t like the voting methods they used, where they voted from, or who they may have voted for.

“Every single voter challenged by Petitioner in this appeal, both here and abroad, cast their absentee, early, or overseas ballot by following every instruction they were given to do so,” Democratic Judge Toby Hampson wrote in a fiery dissent. “Their ballots were accepted. Their ballots were counted. The results were canvassed. None of these challenged voters was given any reason to believe their vote would not be counted on election day or included in the final tallies.”

He said the court’s ruling would set a dangerous precedent. “Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution,” Hampson added.

Riggs appealed the decision to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has a 5–1 Republican majority with her recusal. It issued a temporary stay on Monday, but is likely to ultimately affirm the court of appeals given its hard-right leanings.

Election law experts believe the federal courts could step in, given how Griffin is seeking to change the rules of the election after the fact and challenge only certain types of ballots. “The court’s decision appears to violate the well-established federal due process principles that govern the resolution of state (and federal) election disputes,” wrote Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School. Ben Ginsberg, who represented the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 Florida recount, said that the state appellate court “has gone where no court has gone before.” Riggs, herself a longtime voting rights lawyer, said on Friday that she believed “this fight ends in federal court.”

The appellate court gave voters with incomplete registrations or those who did submit photo ID from overseas 15 days to affirm their eligibility before instructing the state election board to toss their votes and readjust the count, which Griffin believes will result in his victory. Hampson called that step “a fiction that does not disguise the act of mass disenfranchisement the majority’s decision represents.”

Confirming the eligibility of 60,000 otherwise lawful voters in a two-week period five months after the election will be a massive hurdle for Democrats and pro-democracy groups. “There can be no doubt that tens of thousands of voters—through no fault of their own—will be unable to cure their registrations or ballots in time,” Riggs’ campaign said in a legal filing.

“The judges went rogue and just created this cure process,” added Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina For The People Action. “It’s a logistical nightmare to track down 60,000 people to get them to correct something they shouldn’t have to correct. Their votes count for all the other races but not for this race. It’s an incredibly desperate attempt to rewrite the rules for just this race.”

Unlike the courts that rejected Trump’s effort to overturn the election on more than 60 occasions in 2020, Republican judges in North Carolina have bent over backward to help Griffin.

The chief judge of the appeals court, Chris Dillon, chose the panel of judges that heard Griffin’s appeal. Chief Justice Brian Newby, who Griffin has called a “good friend and mentor,” appointed Dillon as the top judge last year, breaking with precedent to oust sitting Republican judge Donna Stroud, who was deemed too liberal by hard-right Republicans. Fellow Republican judges, including Griffin and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr., donated to a primary campaign against Stroud. One judge who ruled in favor of Griffin, Fred Gore, ran a “joint campaign” with him in 2020 where they shared the same platform. (The other Republican judge who sided with Griffin, John Tyson, was charged with misdemeanor assault in 2021 for reportedly almost striking Black Lives Matter protesters with his car.)

As the case winds its way through the courts, the effort to overturn the election has been gathering momentum, like a slow-moving train crash that no one is willing to stop.

“The North Carolina Republican Party is one step closer to stealing an election in broad daylight,” said state House Minority Leader Robert Reives said on Friday.

Democracy isn’t dying in darkness this time. Republicans are nullifying it in plain sight—and using this as a road map for 2026 and beyond.

“I absolutely believe it’s a test case,” said Price Kromm. “It’s a test case for whether an election can be overturned after the election with different rules. If this is allowed to go through, it creates a blueprint for how future losing candidates can subvert the will of the voters by litigating through partisan courts.”