By GARY D. ROBERTSON Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina General Assembly elections were finalized Monday as officials issued certificates to the winners in three close legislative races from November that later became subject to recounts and formal protests.
This ministerial action by election administrators also confirms that Republicans have lost their veto-proof control of the legislature — the result of outgoing state Rep. Frank Sossamon losing to Democrat Bryan Cohn by 228 votes.
The certificates issued for Cohn and other Democrats — Terence Everitt and Woodson Bradley for contests for the Senate — mean they shouldn’t have trouble getting seated with others elected to the 2025-26 General Assembly session on Wednesday’s opening day. Certificates for the others were issued weeks ago.
With Sossamon’s defeat, Republicans will retain 71 of the 120 House seats. That’s one seat short of the necessary three-fifths supermajority for veto-proof control. The GOP had held 72 seats since April 2023, which allowed Republicans to override then-Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes at will as long as they remained united.
Now that the Democrats have 49 House seats, the veto stamp of new Democratic Gov. Josh Stein could be more effective during the next two years in blocking GOP measures that he opposes.
The victories for Everitt and Bradley confirm that Republicans will keep 30 Senate seats and Democrats, 20. That’s the same partisan composition during the past two years that gave the GOP a three-fifths majority in that chamber. Everitt defeated Ashlee Adams by 128 votes and Bradley defeated Stacie McGinn by 209.
The Associated Press had not called the races won by Cohn and Everitt until Monday.
Recounts were held in each of these three legislative races. Sossamon, McGinn and Adams also joined with GOP state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin in filing a series of written protests to election officials. The protests challenged whether certain votes cast in their races should have been counted.
The outcome of the Supreme Court race is still pending — Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes out of over 5.5 million ballots cast in their statewide race. Griffin currently serves as a North Carolina Court of Appeals judge.
In two hearings last month, the State Board of Elections dismissed all of the protests filed by the four Republicans, issuing its final written orders on Dec. 27. Those orders commenced in state law a short window for the trailing candidates to seek further recourse.
For the legislative candidates, their only option was to ask members of the General Assembly chamber where they sought to serve to decide who won the seat. Otherwise, the certificates were set to be issued Monday.
McGinn and Adams conceded after the second State Board of Elections protest hearing on Dec. 20. Although Sossamon had previously left open the door to seek recourse in the House should a state legal decision call his “election result into further question,” Cohn’s receipt of the election certificate Monday makes a future reversal in this election extremely unlikely.
The “legal decision” that Sossamon referred to involved a portion of the unsuccessful election protests that the law allowed Griffin to appeal in state court. Griffin is still seeking to remove more than 60,000 votes that he argues were improperly cast.
Most of those ballots came from voters whose voter registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — which a state law has sought in registration applications since 2004. Other ballots were cast by certain categories of military and overseas voters.
The State Board of Elections moved Griffin’s legal efforts to federal court, and Griffin asked U.S. District Judge Richard Myers to block a certificate of election from being issued in the race while more legal arguments related to the registration records and certain overseas votes are heard. Without a stay or injunction, the certificate will be issued Friday electing Riggs for an eight-year term.
But late Monday, Myers ordered the case be returned to sitting justices on the state Supreme Court. That’s where Griffin first sought redress following the first State Board of Elections hearing last month in which his appeals were dismissed.
Myers, who was nominated to the federal bench by Donald Trump, wrote that Griffin’s protests “raise unsettled questions of state law,” while their federal interest is “relatively tenuous.”
“If our system of federalism is to exist in more than name only, it means that this court should abstain in this case, under these circumstances,” he said.
Myers’ order can be appealed. 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.