# Alarm as Republican judge who lost election pushes voter-fraud claim

Jefferson Griffin trying to remove thousands of ballots from North Carolina count in case that has drawn large protests

Four months after the 2024 election, and after recounts affirmed his loss, a  judge running for a seat on the state’s high court has yet to concede. Instead, Jefferson Griffin is still trying to remove more than 65,000 voters’ ballots from the count, contending they were not lawfully able to vote.

Griffin’s case, closely watched by both political parties for its ability to set a precedent in a swing state, is now before the state’s court of appeals, on which he sits. Griffin, a Republican, lost to Democratic supreme court justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes, affirmed by two recounts. The parties filed briefs in early March, and the Republican-leaning court of appeals is expected to schedule arguments soon.

Griffin wants to discard these votes because he alleges their registration information was incomplete, among other arguments, but voting rights advocates say the effort will disenfranchise eligible voters, including new voters and those who have been voting successfully for many years.

“We view this case as a harbinger for what could come in other states, if this is viewed as an example to draw upon in future elections, and we also view it as an example of what at least some members of the Republican party are willing to do in order to win at the cost of our democratic system,” said Ann Webb, policy director with Common Cause North Carolina.

In January, the North Carolina supreme court  the state board of elections from certifying the vote while the court cases play out. Three justices agreed in a  defending Griffin’s challenges that election protests were an important legal right and that Griffin was not seeking to disenfranchise voters. Instead, the case was about “preserving the public’s trust and confidence in our elections through the rule of law”, a Republican justice wrote. Riggs has recused herself from the case.

There are multiple lawsuits alleging the state board of elections should not have allowed wide swaths of voters to be eligible, attempting to negate their ballots. The Republican National Committee filed a similar suit, in which the Democratic National Committee has .

North Carolina citizens, including candidates, can file protests to ballots, and these challenges are not uncommon in the state. Griffin first filed the challenges to the Democratic-majority state board of elections, which , leading him to sue. A federal court said state courts should first decide the state law issues in the case, then federal courts could review federal laws at play. A Wake County Superior Court judge , and Griffin appealed.

Griffin’s challenge stands out because of its breadth and how it attacks rules in place before the election. He isn’t alleging fraud or that voters erred, but that he didn’t agree with the rules in place at the time of the election, Webb said.

“This case that Jefferson Griffin is pursuing is essentially the mass election protest that we expected to see from Trump if he had a narrow loss, and it is clearly being driven by an extremist agenda likely from outside North Carolina to experiment with pushing the limits of election law and making it more possible to challenge elections in this kind of unprecedented way,” said Webb, whose group has opposed Griffin’s challenges and planned rallies around the state.

Griffin challenged more than 65,000 voters: about 60,000 of them, he alleges, had incomplete vote registrations, for issues like a missing driver’s license number or social security digits, even if they registered more than a decade ago; more than 5,500 absentee ballots from overseas military members and their families, saying they didn’t provide photo ID, which is not required by law for this group of voters; and a couple hundred ballots of overseas voters who have not resided in the US but have ties to North Carolina.

The challenges had a disproportionate impact on young voters - about one-fourth of those in the incomplete registration group are aged 18 to 25, . About one-fourth of the students who voted at Duke University were challenged, as were about 400 ballots at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black college.

But voters of all backgrounds and political parties were part of the challenge. A Republican city councilman who was challenged  that Griffin was being a “sore loser”.

In a  before the appellate court, Griffin’s lawyers claim the state elections board had “broken the law for decades, while refusing to correct its errors”.

“This case presents a fundamental question: who decides our election laws? Is it the people and their elected representatives, or the unelected bureaucrats sitting on the state board of elections?”

Lawyers for the state elections board said Griffin “seeks to retroactively change longstanding election rules by bringing novel legal claims”. The board also claims Griffin did not provide adequate notice to voters who were challenged – a postcard with a QR code mass-mailed to challenged voters did not meet legal requirements for notice.

Riggs, who currently sits on the Republican-dominated supreme court, made similar arguments. “Judge Griffin’s protests were properly rejected because they pose a risk to the stability and integrity of our elections. His effort to change the rules after an election is unprecedented,” lawyers for Riggs wrote in an appellate .

---

## Additional Information

Spring Dawson-McClure still doesn’t know if her vote will ultimately count, despite it being counted at least twice so far, because Republicans claim her voter registration wasn’t complete.

She received a postcard from the North Carolina Republican Party in November, after she voted, that said her vote “may be affected by one or more protests filed in relation to the 2024 general election”. It directed her to scan a QR code to view the protest filings. She initially thought, given the sparse information, that it was a general notice sent to voters to “stir up the idea that there had been voter fraud”.

But she found her name listed on a  and reached out to her county and the state board of elections to see what happened. She went to the county elections office in person, where they pulled up a copy of her voter registration application.

She credited the “audacity to hyphenate my name when I got married” for her inclusion on the list – her current name did not match up with a social security database, though her maiden name did. Contrary to the characterization that more than 60,000 voters didn’t provide necessary information to register, Dawson-McClure’s application was complete.

She has voted in 19 elections since 2012, previously without issue. She joined a rally in her town, attended by hundreds of people, to protest against Griffin’s election challenge.

“Truthfully, I’m shocked that this is happening,” she said. “I also actually feel quite scared. I feel scared for the future, that my children will live in this state, in this country, and that if our voting rights are not honored in this case, that we will never have free and fair elections in North Carolina again.”
```