A federal appeals court said on Tuesday that the legal battle in North Carolina over a State Supreme Court seat should be decided in state court.
The opinion from a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dealt a major blow to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, who narrowly won the seat in November but whose Republican challenger is seeking to flip the result.
Justice Riggs had sought to have the issue resolved in federal court. Tuesday’s ruling means that her colleagues on the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, may end up settling the dispute.
Justice Riggs and the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which also wanted federal courts to decide the matter, could still petition for the full appeals court to hear the case.
Three vote counts found that the Republican challenger, Jefferson Griffin, lost the race. The final count, by the elections board in December, found that Justice Riggs won by 734 votes, out of the more than 5.5 million that were cast.
But Judge Griffin, who currently sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, and conservative election deniers have embarked on an extraordinary effort to wipe away that result, and persuade the courts to throw out tens of thousands of ballots that were cast by mail or during early voting.
Judge Griffin and the North Carolina Republican Party have argued that some 60,000 voters in the State Supreme Court election failed to prove their identity — with either the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number — when they registered to vote, as long as two decades ago.
Although the omissions stemmed from a government mistake in preparing the registration forms, Judge Griffin has argued that it leaves the voters’ eligibility in question. He wants their ballots to be thrown out unless they provide legitimate numbers within a limited correction period set by the state.
Critics of Mr. Griffin’s legal strategy say that the voters in question did not do anything wrong. Regardless, they say, concerns about registration forms should be moot because North Carolina law requires both in-person and mail-in voters to provide proof of identity.
They also say that it makes no sense to toss voters’ ballots for one race, but allow them to stand for others.
Anecdotal evidence, including some mentioned in court filings, suggests that many of the voters in question actually did provide part of a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered.
A number of factors could have kept their proof of identity from appearing in the state’s official voter database, including key-punching mistakes and name changes after a marriage. Even some conservatives who voted for Mr. Griffin have voiced concern about their ballots being tossed out.
Justice Riggs’s legal team had argued that the case should be decided in federal court because it centered on federal election law. But Judge Griffin’s lawyers argued last week that the case should be left to North Carolina courts.
Last month, the State Supreme Court blocked state officials at least temporarily from certifying Justice Riggs’s victory. Justice Riggs, who has remained on the court while the case plays out, recused herself.
The State Supreme Court dismissed Judge Griffin’s attempt last month to bypass the lower courts and have his challenge expedited, saying that he must first go to Wake County Superior Court. That court will hold a hearing on Friday.
On Tuesday, three judges on the Fourth Circuit court of appeals wrote in their order that “because the Supreme Court of North Carolina has dismissed the case the board asks us to retrieve, we cannot grant the relief the board requests.”
Several State Supreme Court justices appeared receptive to Judge Griffin’s election challenge last month, even as the court ordered that his case go through lower courts first.
The case has unsettled election experts and government watchdogs across the country, who say that overturning the election would undermine democracy and provide a blueprint for doing it again in the future.
The post Federal Ruling Says State Courts Should Decide North Carolina Election Case appeared first on New York Times.
