Legal challenges delay election result for North Carolina Supreme Court seat

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• Laura Barron-Lopez:

  It's been nearly two months since Election Day, but control of a seat on the North Carolina state Supreme Court is being held up in, well, the courts.

  As Stephanie Sy explains, the trailing candidate is asking for more than 60,000 votes to be invalidated.

• Stephanie Sy:

  After more than 5.5 million ballots were cast in the Tar Heel State, this contest came down to 734 votes separating incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs from her Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin.

  Griffin says there were voting irregularities that could have changed the outcome.

  Here to explain the dispute and the stakes is Rusty Jacobs, voting and election integrity reporter for public radio station WUNC.

  Rusty, it's a pleasure to have you on the "News Hour."

  Judge Griffin, the Republican challenger, is asking for 60,000 votes — he's asking the court system to throw these votes out. Now, that's just about 1 percent of the votes, but in a contest that I understand came down to two one-hundredths of a percent, that matters.

  What irregularities is he alleging?

  Rusty Jacobs, Voting and Election Integrity Reporter, WUNC: He's alleging most — in most cases that 60,000 of these ballots or so were cast by voters who were not completely registered or registered appropriately.

  Essentially, it comes down to this issue over registration forms that predated what was the Help America Vote Act, the HAVA Act. Early 2000s, it passed. Once that law passed, registration required a voter to either provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or a driver's license number.

  Some voters in North Carolina registered with forms that predated passage of that act. This issue has been brought up before and has been dismissed by a federal district court judge and in the lead-up to the most recent election. The state Board of Elections also reviewed allegations that these people were improperly registered and therefore ineligible to vote, and they dismissed that claim, and they looked into it.

  In all these cases, voters who cast ballots in the most recent election had to provide either photo I.D. or fill out an exception form. All of those ballots had to be reviewed by local boards of election. Anybody who cast a ballot, those ballots were reviewed and their eligibility was confirmed.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Why is Mr. Griffin so confident that, were these 60,000 ballots to be thrown out, it would help him or change the outcome of the election? Do we know the registered parties, for example, of who these voters are?

• Rusty Jacobs:

  The pool of voters swept up in these ballot protests filed by Judge Griffin, it includes voters of all registrations, Republican, Democrat, unaffiliated. It also happens to include the parents of Allison Riggs, the incumbent that he's running against.

  It includes an editor from my station, WUNC. These are valid voters. And that was one of the reasons why the Board of Elections and a federal district court judge said you can't just summarily throw these people's ballots out. For all intents and purposes, these are eligible voters who, maybe due to some clerical error, their registration might seem incomplete, but it's not a reason to keep them from having their vote counted.

• Stephanie Sy:

  His opponent, Judge Riggs, has been quoted as saying he's trying to engineer the election. I wonder what the stakes really are, though.

  It's not as if this election itself determines even the political makeup of the state Supreme Court, which is a 5-2 Republican majority. So what is at stake with this outcome, not just in North Carolina, but perhaps broadly, as we see these types of legal maneuverings in other races as well around the country?

• Rusty Jacobs:

  What's at stake really is public trust in elections, elections administration, and election integrity. There's nothing unusual about a race outcome looking like it did, in this case, at the end of Election Day, you have a tight race between two judicial candidates.

  And then over the course of the 10-day canvas period, when all the final ballots are being counted, when provisional ballots are being validated, when absentee ballots are being finalized by boards of election, and if you have a slim margin and the outcome is different after the canvass period than it was at the end of Election Day, that is not unusual.

  But since at least 2020 candidates like Donald Trump, many Republican candidates have tried to exploit tight races like this, where provisional ballots, where ballots that come in at the end of the Election Day process may change the votes.

  They have sought to exploit that and to try to conjure up lack of trust in the process. But this is the process. This is how it works. There were two recounts that came out at the end and showed still a very tight race.

  Now you have a candidate who is trying to convince courts to invalidate ballots that, by and large, seemed to have been cast by eligible voters. If those legal processes are used to change what seems to be a reliable outcome, that could really damage public trust in the elections administration.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And it could be a playbook for other contested elections in the future.

  Rusty Jacobs, a reporter at WUNC, thank you so much for joining us.

• Rusty Jacobs:

  You're welcome.

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