A race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court finally ended last month after a protracted legal fight. But the ramifications of that fight could last a lot longer as Republicans look to change the state's rules on voting. Reporter Bryan Anderson wrote about this recently for The Assembly and his own Anderson Alerts Substack newsletter. He joins me now to talk more about it.
Marshall Terry: So to quickly recap, Democrat Allison Riggs beat Republican Jefferson Griffin in this race by 734 votes. But Griffin challenged that outcome for the next six months. Whose votes did he want thrown out, and what led him to eventually concede?
Bryan Anderson: He sought to make a number of different election protests. These people were disproportionately unaffiliated and Democratic voters, and they were chosen in a different number of ways. One way was looking at more populous urban counties — so your Guilford counties, your Buncombe counties, those types of places — which disproportionately have a lot more Democratic voters. There were also some statewide efforts to accuse people of never residing in North Carolina. And then there were other military and overseas people who were five times more likely, I believe, to be Democrats than Republicans in these cases.
Eventually he conceded because there was a ruling in federal court and [it] said that Allison Riggs was to be seated, and the State Board of Elections was to certify the results. Now, Griffin had the ability to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals if he wanted, but he saw the writing on the wall. Given that the federal judge in that case was also a Trump appointee, it seemed unlikely that Griffin would ultimately prevail.
Terry: Now, you write that this race has given Republicans in North Carolina plenty to work with because of the problems that Griffin highlighted in his arguments. They now control the state's election board, which is a change. What are Republicans plans?
Anderson: So Republicans, right now in the State Board of Elections, they voted earlier this week to approve a plan unanimously. And what it would do is it would send out notices to 194,000 voters in North Carolina with reportedly incomplete registration information. So tying this back to the Griffin protest, this is people who on their voter registration lacked their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number — 98,000 of these people would have to provide such information in order for their ballots to count without having to cast a provisional ballot. The other 96,000, they would be able to continue voting as normally, regardless of whether they provide this information or not. But the state still wants to collect it so that way its voter rolls are clear and up to date.
Terry: One of the groups of voters that Griffin targeted and that you focus on in your piece are the so-called "never residents." Who's in this group, and how could changes around them affect voting regulations?
Anderson: Essentially what had happened in the Supreme Court race was Jefferson Griffin had accused a number of people of never residing in North Carolina. And it got that way because these people checked off a box on a federal postcard application, and may have checked the wrong box on that form, is how they got on this list.
And so, there's some people who have actually never lived in North Carolina. And then, there are people who have lived in North Carolina and are wrongly on this list.
The State Board of Elections told me that it's looking into the people who have lived in North Carolina to make sure that they're still able to vote as normal. The other people who are indeed "never residents" going forward, they're only going to be allowed to vote in federal elections. So there's several hundred people who are going to have their votes diluted, and it's just a matter of time before we get a clearer sense of exactly how many people are on that list.
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Terry: So if Republicans implement these changes, is it safe to say we can expect pushback, and even legal challenges, from Democrats and other opponents?
Anderson: When there's federal questions involved, Democrats are almost assuredly going to file lawsuits — and that will be a contentious issue. But when it comes to state law, given the makeup of the state Supreme Court, that's a conservative majority — there's a sense that Democrats see the writing on the wall.
So it kind of depends on what the issue is. If there's a question of federal law, we very well will probably see some lawsuits on these changes. But if it's a matter of state law, Republicans are likely to ultimately prevail.
