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Democrats and voting rights groups are sounding the alarm after the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the state election board from certifying the Democratic winner of a Supreme Court race.
The court will decide in coming weeks whether to throw out tens of thousands of votes and thereby overturn the result of the Democratic incumbent justice’s victory.
In a Wednesday statement, Embry Owens, spokesperson for the Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs’ campaign, blasted state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, Riggs’ challenger, for refusing to accept his electoral defeat.
“Judge Jefferson Griffin has not just refused to concede–he has taken the astonishing step of seeking to toss the ballots of more than 60,000 legal North Carolina voters.”
Both voting rights groups and Democratic state lawmakers are also criticizing Republicans’ on the state Supreme Court over the decision — and the conflict of interest presented by the court temporarily blocking the certification of an election that will decide who sits on that very court.
“They’re basically stealing this election,” Nicole Quick, head Government Relations associate at the non-partisan Carolina Forward, said in an interview with TPM. “It’s terrifying.”
“This is a clear case of the fox guarding the henhouse and only serves to further erode public trust in our courts,” Democratic State Rep Pricey Harrison told TPM. “The voters he is challenging voted following current election laws, including the requirement to show photo ID at the polls. There is no evidence that any of these voters are not legitimately registered, and Jefferson Griffin’s attempts to change the rules after the election because he lost does not change that fact.”
On Tuesday, in a 4-2 order, the GOP-dominated state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the North Carolina State Board of Elections from certifying Democratic incumbent Riggs as the winner in the state Supreme Court race. One Democratic justice and one Republican justice dissented.
The order allows the state Supreme Court to hear Griffin’s challenge, which seeks to toss out 60,000 votes from the November election over registration issues, in an attempt to steal the election from Riggs.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison called Tuesday’s decision and the events that preceded it “craven attacks on North Carolina voters” and “an affront to this country’s foundational values of democracy and the rule of law.”
Riggs, who recused herself from the matter, currently leads against Republican Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes. Two recounts have also affirmed Riggs as the apparent winner of the race.
The majority of the 60,000 votes are being challenged because the voters allegedly had incomplete voter registration on file and are either missing the last four digits of their Social Security numbers or drivers license on their voter files. But any legitimate problems with these votes, as TPM has previously reported, would have been identified and resolved in the last couple of years, and not after the election.
“If the State Supreme Court proceeds to grant either a new election or some other remedy that’s being sought by Judge Griffin, that would open up a vast number of election protests like this after every election,” Ann Webb, Policy Director with Common Cause North Carolina, told TPM. “It would make it very difficult for our state to ever get to finality in our elections whenever a candidate has the resources like Judge Griffin does to pursue this kind of post-election change-the-rules strategy.”
The case has bounced around between courts since Griffin first challenged the 60,000 votes early last month.
In December, the State Board of Elections rejected Griffin’s challenge. In response, Griffin took the case to the state Supreme Court. Attorneys for the Board of Elections responded by removing the case to federal court.
This week, though, a federal judge remanded the case back to the state Supreme Court, prompting the State Board of Elections and Riggs to appeal the remand decision. On Wednesday, Riggs asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to “expedite review and resolve” the case. The case is still unsettled with an appeal currently pending in the Forth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.