Holding signs that said, "Stop The Coup!" and "Count Every Vote," hundreds of people gathered in Raleigh Monday to protest what they see as a partisan effort to disenfranchise North Carolina voters.
Demonstrators assembled outside the old State Capitol, across from the North Carolina Supreme Court, against a Republican judicial candidate's bid to invalidate more than 60,000 ballots over alleged irregularities.
Jefferson Griffin trails Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes in their race for a seat on the state's high court. Riggs' lead 鈥� and apparent electoral victory 鈥� has been confirmed by two recounts.
Griffin is asking that judges discard the challenged ballots, even though the voters who cast them obeyed the rules and followed state and federal laws in place for the 2024 general election.
"Someone is trying to actually cancel some votes that people legally cast after legally registering, and that's stealing democracy away from us," said Roxanne Taylor, from Nash County.
Taylor attended Monday's rally, holding a homemade sign that said: "Make America Follow the Constitution Again."
Griffin has alleged that most of the 60,000 ballots he's challenging were cast by people who were not completely registered to vote in North Carolina.
The issue has to do with whether 鈥� as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 鈥� these voters provided either a driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
But the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which previously dismissed all of Griffin's ballot protests due to a lack of evidence of actual voter ineligibility, found that more than 31,000 of the challenged voters did, in fact, provide the requisite info.
Any missing information in these voters' records, the elections board's general counsel said in an filed for a court hearing on Griffin's protests, are likely because "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."
Moreover, 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.
Griffin is also seeking to throw out more than 5,000 ballots 鈥� drawn from four of the state's bluest counties 鈥� cast by military and overseas voters covered by the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act.
Griffin wants those ballots tossed because these UOCAVA voters didn't present a photo ID with their ballots, even though exempts them from doing so.
"This list is telling me that, even if you follow the rules, even if you do everything right, even if you try to make a difference, they will still try to tell you your vote doesn't count," Jenna Marrocco, 27, told the crowd.
Marrocco is a Wake County voter who had to update her registration at an early voting site because her address had changed. Marrocco told the crowd she made sure to bring her North Carolina driver's license as well as a utility bill and that the election worker told her everything was in order.
"So, you can imagine why I was shocked to find my name on this list because I knew that I did everything right," Marrocco said.
A Wake County Superior Court judge recently upheld the state elections board's decision to dismiss Griffin's ballot protests because it "was not in violation of constitutional provisions, was not in excess of statutory authority or jurisdiction of the agency, was made upon lawful procedure, and was not affected by other error of law."
Griffin has appealed that ruling, seeking a hearing before the North Carolina Court of Appeals. Attorneys for the state elections board have sought to bypass the court of appeals and go directly to the state Supreme Court.
Griffin has declined comment on the matter, pending litigation.
But his spokesperson and the North Carolina Republican Party defended the ballot protests.
Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the NC GOP, said in an email to 瓜神app: "Just like Democrats protesting in Congress against DOGE responsible government spending, North Carolina Democrats today are protesting against following the law and counting the legal votes of North Carolina citizens."
"For months, no one has been able to mount a defense for the State Board of Elections on the merits of these cases, turning to fearmongering and incendiary rhetoric designed to threaten those who care about election integrity," he added.
Meanwhile, Paul Shumaker, a spokesperson for Griffin, said in an email: "The protest is an organized effort by the Democratic Party, because of their fear of judicial review."
The Raleigh protest was the last in a series of more than a dozen demonstrations organized by the voting and civil rights organization Common Cause North Carolina and held across the state over the past few days.
