A federal appeals panel exchanged arguments Monday with lawyers over a still-unresolved November election for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat, immersed in jurisdictional questions over which courts should determine whether roughly 66,000 ballots should have been counted.
Three judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, heard, among others, from attorneys for Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs, trailing Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin and the State Board of Elections, which last month dismissed Griffin’s demand that the ballots get removed from their race tally.
Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes from over 5.5 million cast in the race. Griffin’s attorneys have said their client is likely to win if the votes they allege came from ineligible voters are discounted. Riggs’ allies say Griffin should concede. The eight-year term at stake in the election was supposed to begin in early January. Riggs remains on the court in the meantime. A Griffin victory would expand the high court’s current 5-2 conservative majority.
The panel did not indicate when it will rule following 90 minutes of oral arguments over whether Griffin’s efforts to remove the ballots should be heard in federal court or remain in state court.
For now, Griffin’s challenges sit simultaneously in federal and state court systems — an unusual situation following weeks of legal motions and orders over the election in the ninth-largest state. The back-and-forth between the judges and the attorneys arguing before them Monday emphasized what could be described as arcane matters over when state-law matters can be moved to federal courts or returned to state courts.
Most of the ballots being challenged by Griffin were cast by voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. A state law has required that such numbers be collected in registration applications since 2004.
Other ballots at issue were cast by thousands of military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots; and by fewer than 300 overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were deemed North Carolina residents. Riggs and the board say the ballots that Griffin is challenging were lawfully cast. Republicans backing Griffin, a state Court of Appeals judge, said his challenge is about election integrity.
But Griffin attorney Will Thompson later said that the state Supreme Court’s order made the case before the panel moot.
“My position would be the petition for writ of prohibition cannot come back to life because the state’s highest court has dismissed it on state law grounds,” Thompson told Circuit Judge Toby Heytens. Heytens responded that the case remains alive, especially since the state Supreme Court kept intact a stay that prevents certification of the election. Circuit Judge Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. also heard the case.
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Republished with permission from The Associated Press.
