Republican Jefferson Griffin conceded the North Carolina Supreme Court race Wednesday to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs, bringing an end to the last unresolved contest from the 2024 election that dragged on for months after a barrage of lawsuits.
The announcement came two days after a federal judge ruled against Griffin's legal challenge to tens of thousands of ballots and ordered the North Carolina State Board of Elections to certify Riggs' 734-vote victory.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, effectively put an end to all ongoing litigation and provided Griffin with seven days to appeal. Instead, Griffin, chose to end his legal efforts six months after the final votes had been cast in November's election.
“While I do not fully agree with the District Court’s analysis, I respect the court’s holding — just as I have respected every judicial tribunal that has heard this case,” Griffin said in a statement Wednesday morning. “I will not appeal the court’s decision.”
Riggs said in a statement: "After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes, thousands of volunteers mobilized, hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day."
Riggs, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2023, emerged after Election Day narrowly ahead of Griffin, a state appeals court judge.
A full machine recount and a partial hand recount both showed Riggs leading Griffin by 734 votes out of 5.5 million ballots cast.
But Griffin quickly filed hundreds of legal challenges, backed by the North Carolina Republican Party, in all of the state's 100 counties, alleging that more than 65,000 people had voted illegally.
Those claims focused on three categories of voters: voters who Griffin’s lawyers claimed didn’t have driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers on file in their registration records, overseas voters who haven’t lived in North Carolina and overseas voters who failed to provide photo identification with their ballots.
Those challenges remained tied up in both federal and state courts — including the North Carolina Supreme Court — as a series of nuanced rulings evaluated specific and complex elements related to Griffin’s allegations. Griffin and Riggs recused themselves from the matter when the issue came before the courts they serve on.
The latest, and now final, ruling came Monday when Myers, the federal judge, ruled that the remaining disputed ballots in the contest must be included in the final tally, effectively upholding Riggs’ victory.
Myers wrote that it would be unconstitutional to toss tens of thousands of ballots that Griffin claimed were ineligible months after they were cast.
“You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done,” Myers wrote in his 68-page order.
Riggs' victory will maintain the current 5-2 split on the state Supreme Court, where Republicans have the majority.
Myers’ ruling followed a controversial decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court that allowed election officials to move forward with a period for thousands of military and overseas voters to “cure” their ballots. Myers had earlier blocked that order temporarily to give himself time to review the broader case.
That state Supreme Court decision had found that about 60,000 of the votes in question cannot be thrown out, but that others could be if minor errors were not fixed, meaning those voters would be required to prove their eligibility to election officials. The invalidation of even a small number of those ballots could have changed the outcome of the election.
The saga emerged as a flashpoint over whether ballots could be tossed long after voters had cast them, an effort that Griffin’s critics warned could be replicated in future attempts to overturn close races.
Those critics noted that Griffin’s arguments contradicted several long-held precedents in election law, including the notion that the rules of an election must be set before voting occurs.
“This is a righteous victory for democracy and a clear defeat of political gamesmanship,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said a statement following Griffin's concession. “For 200 days, Republicans in North Carolina sought to overturn the will of the people, hijack a state Supreme Court seat, and systematically undermine basic faith in our elections.”
The DNC had joined in some of the legal efforts to fight Griffin’s challenges.
Griffin, in his statement, hit back against some of the Democrats' claims, saying that “this effort has always been about upholding the rule of law and making sure that every legal vote in an election is counted.”
The State Board of Elections will now move to formally certify the race's results. State Republicans recently took control of the board after a battle in the courts, which further amplified Democrats' worries over whether the Supreme Court race results would be overturned.
In a 3-2 vote that occurred just hours after Griffin conceded, the new GOP majority on the board voted to replace the group's executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, with Sam Hayes, an attorney who has worked for state Republicans for years.
Republicans were able to take over the board after the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a bill last year that shifted the authority to appoint members to the panel from the governor, who is a Democrat in North Carolina, to the auditor, an office Republicans won in the 2024 election. GOP lawmakers successfully overrode a veto from the governor before they lost their supermajority in the Legislature.
After months of litigation, the North Carolina Court of Appeals said last week that the law could stand, allowing Republican state Auditor Dave Boliek to name a new board.
