Everyone in America should be watching North Carolina right now.
Last November, Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, lost a pivotal election for the state’s Supreme Court. Now he’s asking that same court to make him the winner on the flimsiest of grounds. More specifically, he wants the Republican-dominated court to change the law about whose votes are counted, weeks after the election took place. And the court is, mystifyingly, considering his demand.
About 5.5 million people voted in this election, and a handful of elected judges have put themselves in a position to say who wins. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. I’ve covered North Carolina politics for 20 years. I’ve seen a lot. But never have I seen a more flagrantly, anti-democratic bid to unravel the democratic process.
A margin of 734 votes is tiny, but a loss is a loss.
While President-elect Donald Trump isn’t directly involved in what’s happening here in North Carolina, his “if I didn’t win, it doesn’t count” mindset is. It’s infected Griffin and the leadership of North Carolina’s Republican Party. It is the black rot at the center of their political movement. Indeed, one longtime voting rights advocate in North Carolina referred to Griffin’s effort as “a nonviolent version of Jan. 6.”
“Our democracy is sick,” the progressive activist Ezra Levin opined in 2018 during the first Trump administration. But if Republican judges throw out an election defeat because they can, which is a very real possibility here, then our democracy isn’t “sick,” it’s “terminal.”
How in the world did we get here? In November, Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, beat back a challenge from Griffin by 734 votes, to be exact. Griffin led on election night, but as the state counted tens of thousands of provisional ballots cast across the state, Riggs overtook him. Two recounts confirmed the outcome. A margin of 734 votes is tiny, but a loss is a loss.
While this election is for just one seat, it has major implications down the road. If Riggs had lost, it would be nearly impossible for Democrats to retake the majority on the state Supreme Court before the next redistricting in 2030.
That’s a big deal in any state, but especially in one as gerrymandered as North Carolina. Here, a majority of people can vote for Democrats and the election can still yield a strong Republican majority in the Legislature and in the state’s congressional seats. Believe it or not, this affects you whether you live in North Carolina or not. The math is simple. Republicans’ gerrymandered maps in North Carolina netted the GOP three congressional seats this year, and the GOP holds the majority in the House of Representatives by just five seats.
Republicans on the state court have shown no appetite for curbing gerrymandering, at least as long as it benefits their party. So Democrats and nonpartisan advocates for good government are hoping to elect more candidates like Riggs, a voting rights attorney who once argued to police gerrymandering at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Griffin and his fellow Republicans aren’t taking the loss to Riggs well. With the full-throated support of North Carolina’s state Republican Party, Griffin challenged 60,000 votes that he says shouldn’t have been counted, with twice as many Black voters’ ballots challenged as White voters’. Despite that number, he’s provided no evidence that a single one of them was cast by an ineligible voter.
The court could have simply allowed the elections board to certify Riggs’ win this week, with nothing else said. Instead, they issued a stay on certification and told Griffin they’ll hear his case later this month.
In other words, the GOP’s own photo ID law debunks their claims.
Griffin is mostly challenging the ballots of people whose driver’s license or Social Security number aren’t recorded in the state’s voter database, even though that absence doesn’t render someone ineligible to vote. Many of those voters likely registered before the Help America Vote Act of 2002 required states to collect such information. A state worker might have failed to input that info through no fault of the voter. And regardless, North Carolina voters had to prove their eligibility on Election Day with a photo ID, a requirement North Carolina Republicans themselves sought for a decade and finally put in place before the 2024 election. In other words, the GOP’s own photo ID law debunks their claims.
Many legal North Carolina voters have come forward since the election to say their vote has been challenged. Some have been voting for years with no problems. In a fitting twist, two of the challenged ballots were cast by Riggs’ parents. Americans have seen this movie before; in North Carolina, we were prominently featured in it. In the 19th and 20th centuries, white supremacist politicians in Southern states, including North Carolina, rewrote laws to block Black people from voting — using poll taxes, literacy tests and whatever else they could throw against the wall. When legal tedium didn’t work, they killed people. Those “Jim Crow” politicians often claimed that Black voters were committing voter fraud to rig the results. No election, they argued, could be trusted if their side lost because it had been stolen by fraudulent voters. Any of this sound familiar? I’m no attorney, but even I can see that Griffin’s case has a bigger hole in it than the Titanic. But enough Republicans on the state Supreme Court are giving this most unserious of arguments serious thought. This is a test: of elections, checks and balances, judicial independence, and, most importantly, of American democracy. Not every Republican on the court wants to go along with this. In a rare dissent, Supreme Court Justice Richard Dietz seemed to understand the moment, writing that the court “invites incredible mischief” if it grants Griffin’s demands. “It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections,” he wrote. Cynics have been saying for years that North Carolina is no longer, technically, a democracy. As Jefferson Griffin and his allies in the Republican Party move closer to tossing out an inconvenient defeat, it’s looking more and more like those cynics have a point. This is a test: of elections, checks and balances, judicial independence, and, most importantly, of American democracy. If we fail, it will stain this state for generations. Griffin and North Carolina’s Republican leaders need to answer a pressing question: Are they the untethered hordes of the “Jim Crow” South, the thugs who took power with force when they couldn’t win it with elections? Or are they the patriots who see, as they must, that there is something bigger than them and their party at stake?
Billy Ball is an award-winning journalist from North Carolina who founded The Living South, a journalism project focused on changemakers in the American South. He is also a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site that covers North Carolina politics. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. 
