The North Carolina Supreme Court issued an order Tuesday that blocks state officials from certifying the Democratic candidate as the winner of a razor-thin race for the state’s high court.
In a 4-2 vote, all but one of the Republicans on the state Supreme court ruled to prevent the North Carolina State Board of Elections from certifying the results of the race, where Democratic Justice Allison Riggs holds a 734-vote lead over Republican Jefferson Griffin. Riggs recused herself from Tuesday’s order.
The decision by the court that Griffin is seeking to join, and that Riggs is seeking to remain on, allows the justices to now hear a challenge from Griffin that seeks to throw out 60,000 votes cast in November.
The order vowed to address the issue “expeditiously” and outlined a schedule that sets a deadline for all briefs in the case to be filed by Jan. 24.
Riggs, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023, emerged from Election Day with a narrow advantage over Griffin, triggering a series of recounts. A full machine recount and a partial hand recount showed Riggs leading Griffin by 734 votes, out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast.
Griffin subsequently filed hundreds of legal challenges across all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, claiming that nearly 60,000 people voted illegally. Lawyers for Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party alleged that many of those voters didn’t have a driver’s license number or Social Security number on file in their voter registration records. The allegations were also related to overseas voters who haven’t lived in North Carolina and who failed to provide photo identification with their ballots.
But the state elections board, where Democrats have a 3-2 majority, rejected all three categories of protests by Griffin last month. That prompted Griffin to ask the state Supreme Court to take up his challenges.
The case was initially heard in federal court because the North Carolina Democratic Party had pre-emptively filed a federal suit in December that sought to ensure that all ballots in the race were counted.
But on Monday, the federal judge hearing the case — an appointee of President-elect Donald Trump — sent it back to the state level, siding with a request from Griffin. North Carolina's board of elections has filed an appeal of that decision with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, but that court has not scheduled initial briefs until February. Riggs' campaign on Wednesday requested that the court expedite its hearing of the case.
"The people of North Carolina deserve a swift resolution and Justice Riggs will prevail,” Riggs campaign spokesperson Embry Owen said in a statement.
In its Tuesday order, four of the five Republican justices on the state Supreme Court wrote that because the federal court remanded the case back to the state level, it would grant Griffin’s request for the election’s certification to be blocked so it could evaluate the claims regarding the 60,000 votes.
The lone Republican dissenter, Richard Dietz, wrote under a legal doctrine known as the "Purcell principle," intervention by the judiciary close to an election "becomes inappropriate because it can damage the integrity of the election process."
He called Griffin's quest "post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process."
"The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of our elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid," Dietz added, before adding that he did "believe some of these legal challenges likely have merit."
The lone Democrat on the court who voted wrote in a dissent that “the standard for a temporary stay has not been met here,” adding that “there is no likelihood of success on the merits and the public interest requires that the Court not interfere with the ordinary course of democratic processes as set by statute and the state constitution.”
North Carolina Democrats blasted Griffin and the Republicans on the Supreme Court over the latest development.
Former Gov. Roy Cooper wrote on X that “Republicans want to toss thousands of legal votes in the trash because they don’t like the outcome.”
“This shouldn’t be about party politics — this should be about making sure every vote counts & that our elections still mean something,” Cooper wrote.
