North Carolina’s highest court issued a ruling to disenfranchise voters Friday in the ongoing legal saga over the 2024 election between state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs (D) and her Republican challenger, appeals court judge Jefferson Griffin.
Per today’s ruling, around 60,000 ballots with incomplete registrations cast in the 2024 state Supreme Court election will be counted. The Court also issued a 30-day cure period for the roughly 5,000 overseas military voters who did not provide proper photo ID when they registered to vote. But the Court greenlit the decision of a lower court to reject around 200 ballots cast by overseas voters who are registered to vote in North Carolina but never resided in the state. Those ballots will not be counted.
Riggs said in a statement that she will immediately ask the federal courts to intervene in the case.
“This is disenfranchising of voters and raises the risk of election subversion,” the election law scholar Rick Hasen wrote online. “It’s unprecedented … and it violates due process rights of voters (and potentially other federally protected rights) by changing the rules after the fact.”
The ruling is the latest development in Griffin’s ongoing legal challenge to the November election, which he lost to Riggs by just 734 votes. Griffin filed multiple lawsuits challenging the state’s decision to count some 65,000 ballots cast by voters with incomplete registrations, military and overseas voters who didn’t provide photo ID or overseas voters who never resided in North Carolina.
“I’m the proud daughter of a 30-year military veteran who was deployed overseas, and it is unacceptable that the Court is choosing to selectively disenfranchise North Carolinians serving our country, here and overseas,” Riggs said in a statement. “While I’m gratified to see the Court of Appeals reversed on the erroneous decision to potentially disenfranchise the more than 60,000 North Carolinians whose registration my opponent has recklessly challenged, I will not waiver in my fight to protect the fundamental freedoms for which our military service members and their families have sacrificed so much.”
The case now goes back to the North Carolina appeals court, which will then remand the case to the trial court for further action.