RALEIGH — In less than 24 hours, Danielle Brown left an out-of-state bus tour, came home to North Carolina to cast a vote in the 2024 general election and then boarded a plane to rejoin the tour. Now, her vote is one of nearly 67,000 ballots contested by Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin as part of his attempt to overturn his apparent loss to Democratic Judge Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court.
On Election Night, Griffin appeared to be the victor. However, as provisional and absentee ballots were counted, he slowly lost his lead. By the time election staff tallied official results during their canvasses, Riggs was up by a mere 734 votes. Two recounts confirmed Riggs’ win.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ alerts and weekend roundup newsletters]
Griffin then filed a series of election protests attempting to discard tens of thousands of ballots from the count, on grounds that the State Board of Elections illegally allowed certain categories of voters to cast a ballot. In the past four months, Griffin’s election protests have journeyed through state and federal courts.
On Friday, a panel of N.C. Court of Appeals judges heard the latest arguments and will decide whether a lower state court was right to affirm the State Board of Elections’ dismissal of Griffin’s protests.
Attorneys for Griffin, Riggs and the State Board covered much of the same territory of the past few months. Their arguments centered on whether the election rules the board established for the 2024 general election were the correct ones, and if they weren’t, whether the law allows Griffin to retroactively remove votes from the count.
Whatever the appellate court decides will be subject to appeal. The case will most likely return to the state Supreme Court, which previously paused election certification until the case is resolved but declined to take it up early.
What Griffin is disputing
Griffin is challenging ballots cast by three categories of voters.
First, he contests the ballots of over 60,000 people Griffin alleges were improperly registered to vote because they didn’t provide either a driver’s license or social security number under a faulty voter registration form. The State Board argues that voters who don’t have these numbers have to prove their identity at the polls, so their votes are valid.
Second, Griffin seeks to remove votes of about 5,500 military and overseas voters who did not include a photo ID with their absentee ballots. He argues that the State Board misinterpreted state law by allowing this category of voters to skip voter ID requirements.
Third, Griffin identified about 500 voters, who he calls “Never Residents,” who don’t live in North Carolina but claim inherited residency through a special state law provision. He argues that the state law violates the North Carolina Constitution’s residency requirements, and therefore, those votes should not count.
‘Taking it very personally’
As the case continues, more voters and organizations are getting involved. Carolina Public Press spoke to several of them.
Brown, a national co-field director for Black Voters Matter, found out that she was on the list through a text from an organization called Democracy NC. Her county board of elections told her they didn’t have her driver’s license on file, but she knows she did everything right.
Black voters like Brown are twice as likely as white voters to be in the largest Griffin challenge. Other voters of color and younger voters also disproportionately appear on his protest lists, according to an analysis conducted by Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper.
“I’m taking it very personally because I do feel as if I am being targeted as a Black woman that works for a Black organization that seeks to empower voting across the country,” Brown said. “You’re making voters feel as if their vote does not count or they have to fight for their vote to count when that’s not democracy.”
Latino voters faced hurdle after hurdle this election, said Veronica Aguilar of El Pueblo, an advocacy group for that community.
The new voter ID law presents more of an obstacle for Latino voters and other voters of color than their white counterparts. Voter education tends to be in English, which may hinder the Latino community from staying updated on election rules. Also, many naturalized immigrants come from countries with different voting laws and election processes which may present a learning curve.
Additionally, Aguilar claims that Latino voters experienced voter intimidation during the election, including a proliferation of “unnecessary” signs telling them that if they aren’t citizens, they can’t vote. U.S. citizenship is required to even register to vote, she said, so this was an effort to make naturalized citizens “question whether or not they could vote.”
The fact that Latino voters disproportionately appear on the protest lists aligns with political rhetoric that immigrants “don’t belong” in the U.S., Aguilar said.
“So even if it is not intentional, it is contributing to the narrative that Latino immigrants, naturalized citizens in this country aren’t allowed to participate in our processes and that their voices don’t count,” she said.
Voters of color aren’t the only ones feeling targeted.
Carrie Conley is a military spouse living in Italy. Last year, she requested her absentee ballot through the Guilford County Board of Elections just like she had done seven times before.
Nobody ever asked for her to attach a photo ID to her absentee ballot because under the State Board’s interpretation, North Carolina law doesn’t require voter identification for military and overseas voters.
Conley heard about the Griffin case on social media, found the list and discovered her name was on it. However, none of her fellow military spouses were on the list. She soon learned that ballots from only four Democratic-leaning counties — Durham, Forsyth, Buncombe and Guilford — were being challenged as part of the photo ID protest.
“Why these four counties? Why now?” Conley asked. “It just makes me very upset that this is happening in my state.”
From 1986 to 2013, Debra Blanton served as Cleveland County’s election director. She loved her job and what it meant to voters to know that their vote would be “sacred,” “safe” and “counted correctly.”
Griffin’s attempt to retroactively take away some North Carolinians’ votes “just really raised the hairs on the back of my neck,” Blanton said.
Blanton is one of 42 former election directors who filed an amicus brief, or “friend of the court” argument, meant to offer courts additional insight.
Election directors, current or former, rarely speak publicly on issues. They make a point of being professionally nonpartisan. But Blanton has never seen anyone try to retroactively remove voters from the rolls like this before.
“It is foreign to me that anybody thinks they could attempt to do that,” she said. “There are rules in place, and the rules in place were in effect for this election.”
By the rules?
What were the rules in place for the 2024 general election?
That’s the question lawyers from Griffin, Riggs and the State Board of Elections’ teams tried to answer Friday for a panel of three N.C. Court of Appeals judges.
Were they rules the State Board established for the election, based on their interpretation of state law and the North Carolina constitution? Or were their interpretations incorrect, deeming those rules invalid?
Griffin lawyer Craig Schaeur argued in favor of the latter. The State Board can’t decide to conduct elections based on rules that violate state law and the North Carolina Constitution, he said.
“To be clear, this case is not about changing laws after the election,” Schaeur said. “It’s a case about enforcing the laws that were already on the books before the election.”
State Board lawyer Nick Brod disagreed. If the State Board’s interpretations were incorrect, there was plenty of opportunity to challenge them before the election, he argued.
The state law allowing so-called “Never Residents” to inherit the residency of their parents in order to vote was passed unanimously in 2011 and has been enforced in over 40 elections since, he explained.
The photo ID exception for overseas and military voters has been in place for five elections, he added. And the voter registration form issue that may have led to missing drivers license and social security numbers on file is currently being litigated in a federal lawsuit to apply to future elections.
“From the voters’ perspective,” Brod said, “they did everything that they were asked to do in order to cast a ballot.”
Judges Fred Gore, Toby Hampson and John Tyson will decide the case. Gore and Tyson are Republicans and Hampson is a Democrat. If the panel spits 2-1, then the case may be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Related
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.