Allen G. Breed/AP Photo
A billboard criticizing Republican state supreme court candidate Jefferson Griffin is seen on Capital Boulevard in Raleigh, North Carolina, January 15, 2025.
Members of the armed forces have been pummeled with disrespect over the past several months. Veterans nationwide have had their health care snatched away, their jobs abolished, and their careers sideswiped. The latest indignity comes courtesy of North Carolina, where active-duty members who are state residents now find themselves facing an incomprehensible threat: disenfranchisement. “They are furious about this,” says Jason Cain, a ten-year Army veteran and member of Common Defense, a veterans advocacy group.
The Wake Tech Community College political science instructor has been working to get the word out to people about what’s known as the “Griffin List”: All told, more than 65,000 North Carolina voters’ ballots from last November’s election are being contested because the Republican candidate for a state supreme court seat, Jefferson Griffin, an appeals court judge, found himself on the wrong side of a 734-vote margin that favored Allison Riggs, the Democratic state supreme court justice seeking re-election.
A subset of ballots, 5,509 to be exact, were cast by military and overseas voters. After two recounts, which he lost, Griffin alleges that these people and thousands of others have unlawfully voted. A Republican-dominated state court of appeals sided with Griffin (who recused himself), vacated the earlier rulings in voters’ favor, and ordered that voters update their online voter registration file or furnish a copy of a photo ID over a 15-day “cure” period.
But earlier this week, the state supreme court stayed that appeals court decision. The six justices (Riggs has recused herself) must decide how they want to proceed: They could either take the matter up themselves, likely in some expedited fashion, or decide that the court of appeals’ decision stands, with voters having to provide the required information.
“An election is being stolen right in broad daylight,” says Cain. “We have had a concerted attack on our electoral system from folks who are unfortunately lying to the American people. The most powerful people in the country are telling them that they shouldn’t trust the elections—sometimes, at least when they lose.”
One of the stranger aspects of the country’s only remaining contested 2024 election race is that Griffin had voted twice by absentee ballot when he served in the Army National Guard. The case “proves that all the talk about caring, service, caring for troops is just bogus by extremists who call themselves Republicans,” the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the North Carolina civil rights leader, told the Prospect. “It’s one thing to have voter suppression. This is voter depression: In other words, you depress the vote after the fact.”
North Carolina is providing a template for Republican vote suppressionists throughout the country.
More than 65,000 North Carolina voters’ ballots from last November’s election are being contested.
Barack Obama’s two victories in North Carolina demonstrated that multiracial, multicultural coalitions had cracked the Southern strategy’s foundation of white supremacy, helping to propel people like Riggs into the corridors of power. Seeds were also sown for the fierce Republican reactionary movement that’s cast a pall over the U.S.
In 2010, Republicans gained a supermajority in the North Carolina legislature and began crafting new mechanisms to suppress the votes of African Americans and other people of color, first by requiring voter ID. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down preclearance provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder (2013), state lawmakers then devised new and improved restrictions on registration, early voting, and more.
Prior to the 2022 general election, the state supreme court had a Democratic majority, which struck down voter ID requirements and partisan gerrymanders that had been drawn after the 2020 census. Another lower court had eased limitations on voting rights for formerly incarcerated individuals. When Republicans gained the majority on the court, they eventually reversed all those decisions. Elevating jurists like Griffin to the court would allow it to continue to chip away at voting rights.
“In the [Griffin] instance, what they are doing is not keeping people from voting, but saying after they have voted they want to do a post-election purge,” says Barber. “They are testing another tactic: If you lose, how do you undo the victories that the new demographics produce?”
Cain goes further: “It’s less about military or overseas and more about Democratic-leaning counties,” he says. “People notice that they are willing to throw out military votes or any other vote to win the election.” Griffin targeted military and overseas voters in four of those counties—Buncombe (home to Asheville), Durham (Durham city), Guilford (Greensboro), and Forsyth (Winston-Salem)—and alleges that these voters should have provide photo ID even though the state board of elections had determined that these voters did not have to provide them due to the unique challenges that military members casting a ballot may face. (After all, they may be casting absentee ballots from halfway around the world.) State lawmakers concurred with that position in the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.
The 60,273 votes cast statewide during early voting also came under Republican scrutiny for what Griffin claims are discrepancies in the last four digits of their Social Security or their driver’s license numbers. But state regulations did not require that information at the time that those voters registered. Other alleged discrepancies are the subject of other Republican objections; a number result from data entry errors.
The state court of appeals based its post-election ruling on the status of these voters on their failure to provide photo IDs or information, despite the fact that these voters have been following state rules and regulations for years. (A smaller, third group of voters is “never residents,” usually grown children of North Carolina expatriates who have never lived in the United States. These voters have not been allowed to cure their ballots.)
“You end up getting put into this category, but that doesn’t mean you are lacking the information, that’s of critical importance,” says Jeff Loperfido, chief counsel of voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a regional advocacy group. He points out that the appeals court’s dissenter noted that “nobody’s actually proved to be unqualified or ineligible—it’s this misrepresentation of what the data means.”
What do we know about the North Carolina Supreme Court that might indicate how they view this case? Loperfido notes that in earlier decisions on these issues, several of the justices expressed concerns about the possibility that ineligible people had voted. Two others, however, have noted that many of these matters should have been addressed well in advance of the election or by new legislation afterward, instead of trying to penalize voters who followed rules in place in November. One justice did not tip their hand. Excluding Riggs, five of the justices are Republicans; one is a Democrat.
“The outcome should be dependent on the rules at the time, not some alternative interpretation that someone could make,” he says. “But [Griffin’s team] chose to wait until they actually knew the outcome and the impact, and then selected sort of a subset of voters to target.”
The state’s high court could order a longer curing period that takes overseas timelines into account, or order a new election. The state board of elections ordered a new contest in the 2019 Ninth Congressional District race after board investigators unearthed “a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” Four of the six justices could also back the elections board’s original rejection of Griffin’s protests and lift their stay to allow the board to certify Riggs’s victory—which could be an unlikely outcome given the partisan tilt of the court. Riggs has also indicated that she would consider an appeal to federal court if her win is not upheld, and Griffin, of course, could pursue a similar course.
What is clear is that voter suppression/depression plans are evolving. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina saw lawsuits involving military voting challenges in the run-up to the November election, and the current North Carolina case now provides the most high-stakes test of this mode of voter suppression.
“What’s interesting about this time is that it’s not just Black voters,” Barber warns. “It’s purging voters regardless of their color. People need to pay attention to this.”
