By GARY D. ROBERTSON Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina’s highest court blocked on Tuesday the certification of a November election result for one of its own seats so it can review legal arguments by a trailing candidate who contends over 60,000 ballots that were cast shouldn’t be counted.
The decision by the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court to issue the temporary stay is a setback for Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs. Election results show Riggs ahead of GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin by just 734 votes from over 5.5 million ballots cast.
The ultimate winner gets an eight-year term on a Supreme Court where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans.
The State Board of Elections dismissed last month Griffin’s written protests challenging the ballots. That initiated a timeline in which the board would issue a certificate confirming Riggs’ election this Friday — ending the litigation — unless a court stepped in.
Tuesday’s order stops such certification and tells Griffin and the board to file legal briefs with the justices over the next two weeks.
Lawyers for Griffin, who is a judge on the intermediate-level state Court of Appeals, initially asked the state Supreme Court to intervene three weeks ago. But the elections board quickly moved the matter to federal court, saying Griffin’s appeals involved matters of federal voting and voting rights laws.
Griffin disagreed, and so did U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who on Monday returned the case to the state Supreme Court. Myers — a nominee to the bench by Donald Trump — wrote that Griffin’s protests raised “unsettled questions of state law” and had tenuous connections to federal law.
Hours later, Griffin’s attorneys asked the state Supreme Court for the temporary stay, which the court granted.
“In the absence of a stay from federal court, this matter should be addressed expeditiously because it concerns certification of an election,” Tuesday’s order read.
The order said that Riggs recused herself from the matter and that Associate Justice Anita Earls, the other Democrat on the court, opposed the stay in part because the “public interest requires that the Court not interfere with the ordinary course of democratic processes as set by statute and the state constitution.”
Attorneys for the State Board of Elections and Riggs quickly filed appeals of Myers’ decision with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which could potentially order the case be maintained under federal legal jurisdiction.
Barring intervention by federal appeals judges, the state Supreme Court would essentially be asked to decide the winner for one of its own seats — with the potential of the Republican majority reversing the outcome of the election results.
Democratic allies of Riggs have accused Griffin and the state GOP of trying to rig the election and overturn legitimate results.
A Griffin legal brief said that he would anticipate winning the race if the ballots he contends are unlawful are excluded from the tally, which already has been subject to two recounts. The state GOP has said that Griffin and the party are seeking to ensure every lawfully cast vote is counted.
Most of the ballots that Griffin is challenging came from voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — which a state law has required be sought in registration applications since 2004.
Other large categories of votes that Griffin is challenging were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were deemed North Carolina residents; and by military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.
Attorneys for Riggs and the state board have said removing these votes would violate federal and state laws and the U.S. Constitution, denying the right to vote for so many who followed the rules to cast ballots as were presented to them.
The Supreme Court in the nation’s ninth largest state has been a partisan flash point in recent years in court battles involving redistricting, photo voter identification and other voting rights.