Clik here to view.
Democratic incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs and her Republican challenger, Judge Jefferson Griffin. (Courtesy photos)
Three judges on the state Court of Appeals will hear arguments on Friday in Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin’s effort to throw out votes so he can win a seat on the Supreme Court.
Griffin, himself an appeals court judge, is suing the state Board of Elections in his attempt to toss out more than 60,000 votes he claims were illegally cast. Griffin is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. Riggs is ahead by 734 votes, a lead that has been affirmed in two recounts.
Spectators packed a trial court hearing in February when a Wake County Superior Court judge heard the case. Seating was so scarce that some who came to watch had to wait outside. There will be no opportunity to attend Friday’s hearing. It will be held via WebEx and available to livestream at http://govu.us/nc-coa-oral-arguments at 10:00 a.m.
Republicans hold a 12-3 majority on the Court of Appeals.
Two Republican judges, John Tyson and Fred Gore, and one Democrat, Tobias Hampson, will hear the case.
The trial court hearing resulted in a ruling in favor of the Board of Elections. That led to Griffin’s appeal.
The appeals court hearing and decision are likely to be intermediate steps. Any decision by the three-judge panel will likely be appealed to the state Supreme Court. A federal appeals court also left open the possibility the case could end up in federal court.
Griffin is challenging three sets of ballots. He claims that more than 60,000 voters were not properly registered because they did not include either a partial Social Security number or driver’s license number on their forms. Voters Griffin is challenging have come forward in the past months to say they did provide that information, but it was excluded from the electronic voter file due to typos or data mismatches.
Griffin is also challenging the votes of more than 5,500 military and overseas absentee voters because they did not provide voter ID with their ballots. These voters are from a handful of overwhelmingly Democratic counties. The state Board of Elections does not require military and overseas voters to submit a copy of their photo ID. Griffin’s lawyers say the elections board is wrong to exempt those absentee voters from the photo ID requirement.
Lastly, he is challenging overseas absentee voters who have never lived in North Carolina, but who are connected to the state through their parents.
The Court of Appeals has accepted ‘friend of the court’ briefs from several groups and individuals supporting the state board’s ruling. The list includes former county boards of election members, the U.S. Vote Foundation, which assists overseas and military voters, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, the Secure Families Initiative and Count Every Hero, which support service member voting and the counting of their ballots, the ACLU, and individual voters and voting rights groups.
These groups and individuals said people who followed the rules should not have their votes thrown out.
Clik here to view.
The court filing from former county elections administrators encouraged the judges to adopt the principle that court intervention close to an election is improper because it can damage the integrity of the process.
“Each part of the election process requires the consistent, impartial application of established laws and rules in order to sustain the public’s confidence and participation in the process,” their brief said. “Changing these laws and rules in the middle of an election is disruptive; changing them after an election to apply to the election already held is chaos. How can the public trust the election if the rules can be changed after the results are known in order to produce a different outcome? Sanctioning post-election changes of well-established rules that change an election’s results opens a Pandora’s box of partisan maneuvering and undermines the efforts of administrators to conduct an orderly and fair election.”
The appeals court also accepted a friend of the court brief from Jay Delancy, a longtime hunter of voter fraud in North Carolina. Delancy wrote that he does not agree with the trial court decision, nor does he support the remedies Griffin, Riggs, or the State Board propose.
Voting rights groups have waged a public campaign condemning Griffin for trying to throw out votes after the election. They’ve challenged his lawsuit as a threat to democracy in rallies around the state.
Veterans call on the Court of Appeals to protect military votes
Service veterans spoke at a Thursday morning news conference denouncing Griffin’s effort to throw out military ballots.
“We answered a call to serve and protect our country, ” said Jason Cain, a U.S. Army veteran.
Clik here to view.
“When the North Carolina Board of Elections issues guidance on how we go about voting, we follow orders. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re really good at. So, when North Carolina tells us that we don’t need voter IDs, that we appreciate your service, that we understand the hardships that you’re going through, and that we want you to vote, we follow orders.”
Amanda Reeves, a former active-duty Air Force officer, reservist, and military spouse, said her family has willingly made sacrifices to defend the United States and its values.
“We believe in our Constitution and the goodness of democracy,” she said. “A fundamental part of that is our right to vote, and the belief that our government has an obligation to make voting accessible to its citizens and to protect and respect those votes as the voice of the people.”
Votes Griffin is challenging are legitimate, Reeves said, and many were cast by families like hers.
She asked the appeals court judges to “step up with us to protect the rule of law, to protect the rights of our fellow citizens and their right to participate in our democracy, and to protect our Constitution.”
While voters condemn the notion of throwing out ballots after an election, Griffin’s lawyers pointed out in their written arguments that the state Supreme Court has done so in the past.
Following a close race for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2004, the high court ordered that 11,000 votes cast by people who voted out of precinct on Election Day should be discarded, even though the state Board of Elections had counted them.
Democrats had a majority in the legislature at the time, and lawmakers subsequently passed a law that essentially overturned that opinion, according to a summary published in the journal Popular Government.
In its brief, the ACLU said that the state superintendent case differs from Griffin’s. The ACLU points to older state Supreme Court cases that hold “courts cannot scrap ballots cast by voters who relied on government instructions about which procedures to follow.”