For months, Republicans in North Carolina have tried to do what President Trump and his allies could not in 2020: overturn an election that did not go their way.
What began as a sprawling effort to throw out 65,000 votes from the state’s Supreme Court election in November has shrunk to a legal skirmish over a small fraction of those ballots. But even as Republicans’ path to victory has narrowed, the final outcome still hangs in the balance.
And even if the Democratic candidate’s victory is not reversed, the battle may have sketched a blueprint for overturning future elections.
Never before, legal experts from both parties say, has a losing candidate gained so much legal traction in trying to nullify votes cast by people who followed every instruction given to them, both when they registered to vote and when they submitted their ballots. Federal and state judges have shown a willingness to entertain Republican challenges of votes in Democratic-leaning areas that focused on technicalities and sought to reinterpret voting laws long after Election Day.
The episode, which in many ways is an acceleration of the right-wing movement challenging the 2020 presidential election, could encourage election challenges from candidates who lose fairly but are inclined to fight the outcome. More races could be subject to litigation after the polls close, as candidates try to wipe out votes with help from friendly courts and deep-pocketed legal campaigns.
“The stakes are far greater than one seat on the State Supreme Court,” said Bob Orr, who served on the North Carolina Supreme Court as a Republican but has since left the party to become unaffiliated. He likened some of the recent judicial decisions clearing a path for votes to be tossed out retroactively to “opening up a Pandora’s box.”
“You’ve got a set of rules, and you don’t wait until the ballgame is over and then say, ‘Oh, by the way, I think we need to change the rules and change the score,’” Mr. Orr added.
A ‘rewriting of rules’
The six-month legal odyssey in North Carolina began shortly after the November election.
The Republican candidate, Judge Jefferson Griffin, lost by 734 votes to Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent. Two recounts confirmed the margin.
But Judge Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections that called for ballots from roughly 65,000 voters to be rendered invalid. His argument had more than one part.
He asserted that about 60,000 of those people had been ineligible to vote because they had not supplied certain required personal data, such as a driver’s license number, when they registered to vote. But the omissions, he acknowledged, were not the voters’ fault. The blame lay with administrative errors.
The State Supreme Court rejected that argument, allowing the ballots to count.
Judge Griffin also argued that several thousand absentee ballots that had been cast by military and overseas voters should be nullified because those people had not provided identification with their ballots.
This was a particularly remarkable move: North Carolina does has a voter ID requirement, but the State Board of Elections had exempted military and overseas voters from having to provide identification because of logistical and security hurdles. A Republican-controlled rules commission in the State Legislature had supported that exemption.
Nevertheless, the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, ruled this month that these voters must provide identification within 30 days or their ballots will be thrown out. (Justice Riggs has recused herself from the case.) After an appeal, a federal judge appointed by President Trump ordered that the process continue. But last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit temporarily blocked this ID-verification operation while it considered the case.
The complexities do not end there. At the same time, the State Board of Elections interpreted the State Supreme Court’s ruling regarding military and overseas voters as applying only to Guilford County, N.C., where there are about 1,400 contested votes. Judge Griffin has appealed that interpretation, asking that five more counties be included in the ruling. If he wins that appeal, the number of votes in question will increase to about 8,600. All of those counties lean Democratic.
Lawyers for Judge Griffin have said they are trying to enforce laws that were on the books before the election but that the board of elections failed to apply. The North Carolina Republican Party has been supportive of Judge Griffin’s challenge.
“It’s unfortunate anyone has bought the lie from Democrats that this case is about anything other than the failure of the State Board of Elections to follow the law,” said Matt Mercer, the spokesman for the state Republican Party.
As this legal back-and-forth extends toward summer, voting-rights experts see a troublesome future, when candidates could regularly refuse to accept the results of close elections and when courts could bless those challenges.
“It’s a kind of retroactive rewriting of rules that is fundamentally unfair to voters who followed all the rules to cast their vote and have their vote counted,” said Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But it also means that no election is reliably final if it invites this type of post-election effort to change the rules in order to change the result.”
An uncertain future
Judge Griffin’s effort in North Carolina is a culmination, of sorts, of a growing movement among right-wing groups to challenge voter eligibility en masse.
Spurred on by the conspiracy theories of election fraud that proliferated after the 2020 election, which were in turn driven by Mr. Trump’s lie that the contest had been stolen from him, these groups have embarked on their own investigations of voter eligibility. They have filed mass challenges and flooded local election officials with complaints that often target minority and poor communities, groups that have traditionally leaned Democratic.
Legal experts said some of the lawsuits in 2020, including those that tried to toss out ballots placed in drop boxes, had served as something of a trial balloon for Judge Griffin.
Danielle Lang, the director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said those cases “were thrown out everywhere because it was beyond the pale to suggest that a voter who dropped their ballot in a drop box set up by election officials” could have that vote invalidated after an election.
But should the courts ultimately side with Judge Griffin, Ms. Lang warned, “you will be able to engineer election results.” Or at least try to with much greater ease.
Judge Griffin’s legal effort is also most likely a preview of what could happen if activists succeed in rewriting the rules governing another, once-routine element of elections: the certification of votes, a typically ceremonial task that finalizes an election’s result.
After the 2020 election, and again in the run-up to the 2024 contest, activists sought to make the certification process discretionary, allowing local officials or partisan legislators to disrupt certification if they doubted the result’s integrity. Judges rebuffed those efforts.
But in January, citing Judge Griffin’s legal battle, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked state officials from certifying Justice Rigg’s victory. It was the only race in the state not to be certified.
Now, a primary justification used by Republicans for overturning the results of the race — though not any other contest in the state despite the likelihood that the voters in question also voted in those races — is that the State Supreme Court election remains uncertified.
“Historically, certification has been seen as the end of the election, including the end of challenges to election results,” said Mai Ratakonda, the election protection program director at States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit that works with state officials to increase confidence in elections.
Even amid the uncertainty in North Carolina, some election experts were able to see a benefit in having this debate well before major elections like the 2026 midterms.
“A possible silver lining,” said Bob Bauer, a professor at New York University Law School who has advised Democrats on election law issues, “is that the courts will have the opportunity to rule clearly now, early in this election cycle, that these kinds of election challenge strategies are impermissible.”
Anne Tindall, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections, said the bottom line was that a dangerous precedent was being set.
“The big story here,” she said, “is that never, ever, ever before have we seen a court, months after an election, change election rules to retroactively disqualify a class of voters and flip the results.”
“If you can do that,” she added, “no election is safe — period.”
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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