The Republican candidate narrowly trailing in the North Carolina Supreme Court race has asked that same court to throw out 60,000 ballots from last month's election.
The move from Jefferson Griffin, an appeals court judge, to the state Supreme Court comes a week after losing a challenge before the North Carolina State Board of Elections in which he had also sought to toss those ballots. Griffin currently trails Democratic Justice Allison Riggs by just 734 votes.
Attorneys for Griffin’s campaign filed a lawsuit Wednesday night requesting the state Supreme Court block the elections board, which is controlled by Democrats, from counting those 60,000 ballots and to not certify the current results. Republicans have a 5-2 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
“In the 2024 general election, the Board’s errors changed the outcome of the election for the open seat on this Court,” Griffin’s attorneys wrote. “When those errors were raised again in valid election protests, the Board then claimed that it was too late to fix its law-breaking.”
In a post on X, the North Carolina Democratic Party slammed the lawsuit as a “truly outlandish move,” comparing it to a “five alarm fire” and accusing Griffin of having “taken his attack on voters one step further.”
“He is now trying to achieve what’s been aiming for all along: getting the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court to toss out legitimate ballots and hand this seat to him,” the party's post read.
The suit in the battleground state race is the latest chapter in a running saga since the November election.
Griffin and North Carolina Republicans have claimed that the 60,000 votes in question should be invalidated because they were fraudulently cast by ineligible voters — an argument that was rejected last week by the state elections board. If the votes were to be thrown out, Griffin would lead the race.
Riggs, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023, emerged after Election Day narrowly ahead of Griffin, triggering a series of recounts.
A full machine recount and a partial hand recount of the race both showed Riggs leading Griffin by 734 votes. More than 5.5 million ballots were cast in the race.
NBC News has not yet projected a winner in the race.
Following the original outcome after Election Day, Griffin’s team filed hundreds of legal challenges across all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, alleging that nearly 60,000 people voted illegally. Many of the allegations centered around people who Griffin’s lawyers claimed didn’t have a driver’s license number or Social Security number on file in their voter registration records. Their protests were also related to overseas voters who haven’t lived in North Carolina and who failed to provide photo identification with their ballots.
The state elections board rejected all three categories of protests by Griffin and North Carolina Republicans last week, but has yet to formally certify the election results.
NCSBE spokesperson Patrick Gannon said the board had "certified the vote totals" in the Riggs-Griffin race, but can't issue a certificate of election, which would be the final step, "until all protests and appeals are adjudicated."
Earlier this month, the North Carolina Democratic Party filed a suit in federal court that sought to ensure all ballots in the race were counted. The pre-emptive effort pointed out that the federal law does not allow states to toss out ballots because voter registration papers are missing driver’s license or Social Security numbers.
The lawsuit also noted that, ahead of the election, Republicans had filed a suit seeking to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls who had the same information missing in their registration records. The case, filed in a federal court, was dismissed.
Griffin’s latest lawsuit argues that his vote protests raise “questions that our nation’s system of federalism reserves for state courts, not federal courts.”
