Jefferson Griffin's effort to invalidate thousands of ballots in his bid for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court has drawn the attention 鈥� and deep concerns 鈥� of former elections officials and military brass. In legal briefs, the groups argued Griffin's ballot protests threaten to thwart free and fair elections.
Griffin, a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, trails Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent justice on the state Supreme Court, by 734 votes, as confirmed by two recounts. But Griffin is suing to discard more than 65,000 ballots over alleged irregularities.
Griffin's main adversary in his legal battle is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which denied his ballot protests in December, citing a lack of evidence of any actual voter ineligibility. Griffin appealed to state courts.
Last month, a Wake County Superior Court judge affirmed the state elections board's dismissal of Griffin's case. Now, Griffin has taken the matter to the state Court of Appeals, where oral arguments will be scheduled soon. The state appeals court is dominated by Republicans, including one judge who contributed to Griffin's legal expense fund.
Tossing out the ballots would be an 'injustice'
"This cannot stand," said Deborah Blanton, referring to Griffin's effort to discard ballots. Blanton served as the local elections director in Cleveland County for nearly 30 years.
"It will be an injustice to the system," she added.
Blanton is one of the 42 former county elections directors from across the state 鈥� from red, blue, urban, and rural areas 鈥� who signed the amicus brief opposing Griffin's efforts. The group includes registered Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated.
Collectively, according to the amicus brief submitted by the former directors, the group "has more than 750 years of experience in managing elections for the public."
Blanton said she and many of her colleagues formed friendships and bonds over their shared belief in the importance of civic engagement and fairly administered elections.
"Who can have faith in the elections process?" Blanton asked, expressing her concern over the prospect of Griffin succeeding in his quest.
Griffin has alleged that more than 60,000 early and absentee-by-mail voters' ballots should be discarded because their registrations were incomplete. The issue is whether these voters' records contain a driver's license number or last four digits of their Social Security number.
But, under , missing that information, or not possessing it, does not preclude a voter from registering and subsequently casting a ballot. Moreover, the state elections board has verified that more than half of the voters Griffin is challenging did, in fact, provide the requested identifying information; clerical and administrative errors resulted in it missing from their registration records.
In their brief, the former elections directors argued Griffin is trying to change the rules for voting after the election took place, which violates legal principles established to protect the integrity of elections.
"Sanctioning post-election changes of well-established rules that change an election鈥檚 results opens a Pandora鈥檚 box of partisan maneuvering and undermines the efforts of administrators to conduct an orderly and fair election," the group said in its brief.
Griffin also targeting military, overseas voters
Griffin also wants to toss out 5,509 absentee ballots cast by military and overseas voters covered by the federal , or UOCAVA, and its state analog, the , or UMOVA.
Griffin himself cast a military absentee ballot in 2020 as a member of the North Carolina Army National Guard.
Griffin and his attorneys argue that these particular ballots, drawn from four democratically leaning counties, should be invalidated because the voters who cast them did not provide photo ID. However, neither federal nor state law requires them to do so.
"Months after an election has occurred and ballots have been counted (and recounted), (Griffin) seeks to reverse the outcome of that election by changing the election rules and disqualifying the ballots of voters who faithfully followed state procedures," former military leaders and the relatives of service members said in a legal brief.
That brief was filed on behalf of two groups: Secure Families Initiative, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting and facilitating civic engagement for military members and their families; and Count Every Hero, a nonpartisan association of former four-star generals, admirals, and former secretaries of the military branches.
"Sanctioning post-election changes of well-established rules that change an election鈥檚 results opens a Pandora鈥檚 box of partisan maneuvering and undermines the efforts of administrators to conduct an orderly and fair election." 鈥� the amicus brief signed by 42 former county elections board directors opposing Jefferson Griffin's ballot challenges
Questioning the legitimacy of these UOCAVA ballots just adds more doubt and uncertainty to a process that is already daunting for deployed military personnel and their family members, said Kellie Artis, whose husband is based at Fort Bragg and has served in the Army for more than 20 years.
Artis is a member of SFI and attended the Wake County Superior Court hearing last month out of solidarity with the UOCAVA voters whose ballots Griffin is challenging.
Artis voted at home in last year's elections and, so, is not one of the voters on Griffin's list. But Artis she said she knows the hurdles service members and their families who want to participate in elections face when sent abroad or to other postings in the United States.
"They could be out in the field for the entire campaign cycle," she said. "We could be serving overseas because we have followed our spouse."
To military families, in particular, Artis said, Griffin's ballot challenges are "crushing."
North Carolina's Republican-led legislature adopted a photo ID requirement for voters in the fall of 2018 and the state elections board had to adopt rules for implementing the new law.
In 2019, the state elections board adopted a temporary rule exempting UMOVA voters from the photo ID requirement. However, the photo ID requirement and relevant rules did not go into effect at that time because of a court injunction ordered during litigation over the new law.
In 2022, a newly elected conservative majority on the state Supreme Court reinstated the photo ID law and once again, the state elections board had to adopt for implementing the voting requirement.
All told, the state elections board went through the photo ID rules adoption process three times, twice as temporary rules, in 2019 and 2023, and once as a permanent rule, in 2024. Each time, the state elections board had to submit the rule language, including the photo ID exemption for UMOVA voters, for approval by the legislatively appointed Rules Review Commission.
Throughout that process, the photo ID exemption repeatedly received approval from the Rules Review Commission and faced no opposition from lawmakers.
"The proper vehicle to raise such issues was through a challenge to the statutes and rules themselves long before Election Day," the SFI and Count Every Hero brief argued.
Griffin has repeatedly declined comment on the matter pending litigation, but in his legal brief he insisted that the state elections board wants the court to "let an important, close election be decided by illegal ballots."
"Doing so disenfranchises the millions of voters who are entitled to a fair election under the rule of law," Griffin maintained in his appeal brief.
Griffin and his attorneys are also trying to discount a few hundred ballots cast by overseas voters who never resided in the state, even though deems them eligible to vote as long as the last place their parent or legal guardian was registered to vote in was North Carolina, and the voter has not previously registered in any other state.
"Changing these laws and rules in the middle of an election is disruptive; changing them after an election to apply to the election already held is chaos," the former elections directors argued in their brief.
