If Jefferson Griffin succeeds in his effort to invalidate thousands of ballots in his race for a seat on the state Supreme Court, it will come at the expense of lawfully registered North Carolina voters.
That's according to an audit of the more than 60,000 contested voters conducted by the State Board of Elections.
Griffin, a Republican judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, trails by 734 votes in his race to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Justice Allison Riggs. That gap has been confirmed by two recounts.
But Griffin has managed to hold off certification of his apparent electoral loss by suing to throw out more than 60,000 ballots he claims were cast by voters who are not properly registered.
NCSBE analysis challenges Griffin's 'contested voters' claim
Last week, a Wake County Superior Court judge ruled against Griffin and determined the state elections board was within its state constitutional and statutory rights to dismiss Griffin's ballot protests. Griffin has appealed to the state Court of Appeals, where Republicans hold a majority.
The GOP candidate claims thousands of early and mail-in voters cast unlawful ballots because their registration records are incomplete. Griffin asserts these targeted voters failed to provide one of two required forms of identification, either a driver's license number or last four digits of their Social Security number, and, therefore, should have their ballots thrown out.
To bolster their allegations, the Griffin camp hired Ryan Bonifay of the political consulting firm ColdSpark to examine state elections board data. Bonifay ran a data query searching for North Carolina voters whose records seemed to be missing a driver's license number or last four digits of their Social Security number. Then, according to court documents, he matched that data against a list of voters who cast early and mail-in ballots in the 2024 general election.
But in a response filed in Wake County Superior Court ahead of last week's hearing, the state elections board's general counsel, Paul Cox, submitted an citing database research showing many of the challenged voters were, in fact, properly registered.
That audit showed 29,972 voters being challenged by Griffin did, in fact, provide the requisite identification numbers when they registered.
Another 1,196 fell into the category of voters who did not possess either form of identification when they registered, and, therefore, would have been given a unique identification number for the purposes of voting.
Under and law, there are provisions for people to register and vote when they do not possess such identification, or, if the numbers are missing from their records.
According to Cox's affidavit, IT staff with the state elections board dug deeper than Griffin's camp did and scoured archived registration data 鈥� registration application records 鈥� for the 62,027 voters targeted by Griffin whose information is missing a driver's license number or last four Social Security number digits.
Small clerical errors are common
In a state with more than 7.4 million registered voters, mistakes with data entry are common.
When a person registers to vote in North Carolina, their local elections board takes their information and enters it into the Statewide Elections Information Management System, or SEIMS. That program then automatically seeks to match the voter's driver's license number of last four digits of their Social Security number with databases maintained by DMV or the Social Security Administration.
If, due to a clerical error, there's a transposed number, incorrect date of birth, or misspelled name, then SEIMS will prevent the voter's identification number from being validated. But that doesn't mean the voter hasn't properly registered or that they're ineligible to cast a ballot.
"In all likelihood, " Cox said in his affidavit, "based on the processes outlined above, these identification numbers were removed from these voters' records when the automatic matching between the elections database and the DMV or Social Security databases did not result in an exact match."
As for the 30,859 remaining challenged voters 鈥� whose records might be missing one of the required identifying numbers 鈥� Cox explained in an email that it likely means this information was not entered by a county elections worker when the voter's registration was initially processed.
There is a variety of reasons why that might have happened, Cox continued. For example, the voter might not have had a driver's license or a Social Security number, or the worker failed to link the voter's information to a preexisting registration for which the voter provided the key information. Or, perhaps, the voter previously had registered before the 2002 passage of the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA.
Under HAVA, people registering to vote must provide one of those two identification numbers. However, until an update last year, North Carolina's registration form had not clearly indicated the identification information was required.
Republicans have sought to exploit the issue as an indication of lax elections administration and to get voters purged from the rolls. Last year, just ahead of the general election, a federal judge dismissed a claim filed by the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee based on the same contentions being made by Griffin and his attorneys.
Cox said determining the reasons behind the missing data would require a complex, record-by-record database search. He said that "would be a significant undertaking for the county boards of elections."
"It would only be necessary if a court determined that an existing registered voter on the list cannot remain registered unless they provide one of these numbers or claim they lack them," Cox added. "The State Board believes the law does not provide for this result, and no court has held that it does."
Griffin's attorneys have not responded to 瓜神app's request for comment.
