Griffin Concedes to Riggs, Ending Six-Month Dispute Over North Carolina Supreme Court Election 

Judge Jefferson Griffin (R), who had attempted to have more than 60,000 votes thrown out in his race for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat, has conceded to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs (D). His action ends a dispute that extended six months after the 2024 election and played out in both state and federal courts.

Griffin’s concession came just two days after a federal district court judge ordered the election be certified. “This case concerns whether the federal Constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact,” Judge Richard E. Myers II wrote in Monday’s decision. The answer, he said, is “no.”

Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, made no claims of voter fraud. Nor did he claim that Rigg’s narrow 734-vote lead — confirmed by two recounts — was inaccurate. Instead, his challenge before the federal court focused on established election rules applying to citizens who cast their ballots from overseas. Griffin claimed that rules relating to voter IDs and certain voters’ eligibility violated the North Carolina Constitution and state statutes.

The federal court’s ruling supersedes an April 11 order from the North Carolina Supreme Court, which said that overseas voters who did not submit a photo ID with their ballots must submit that ID within 30 days to have their ballots counted, and that votes of children and dependents of military servicemembers and overseas citizens who inherited residence from their families but have never lived in North Carolina would be discarded. The state high court left intact an appellate court finding that allowing voters who inherited their residence to vote in North Carolina conflicted with the state constitution’s voter residency provision.

In Monday’s opinion saying those votes must be counted, Myers also said the state elections board was barred from taking any further action to collect copies of IDs from the voters in question. The board was a party to the litigation and argued the election should be certified in accordance with their November vote count.

Griffin’s claims have received national attention and drawn criticism from voting rights organizations, including the Brennan Center for Justice. Under the guise of “election integrity,” Griffin sought to silence voters for his political gain, the Brennan Center said in an amicus brief filed as part of the state court litigation. Griffin could have raised his concerns about the election rules prior to the election but waited until he lost, the brief noted.

“The rules of the game shouldn’t change after the fact. That’s common sense, and it’s what the Constitution requires," Brennan Center counsel Justin Lam said after Griffin’s concession. “This is an overdue win for voters.”

The federal court opinion noted that the rules relating to photo IDs for overseas voters had been on the books for seven months before the November election, and the rule relating to those voters who had never lived in North Carolina in place for over a decade.

“After millions of dollars spent, more than 68,000 voters at risk of losing their votes . . . hundreds of legal documents filed, and immeasurable damage done to our democracy, I’m glad the will of the voters was finally heard,” Riggs said in a statement following Griffin’s concession.

Though only a few thousand overseas votes were potentially at issue in the federal court decision, Griffin had also originally challenged, through a protest filed with the elections board, more than 60,000 votes cast by citizens whose voter registration records included neither a driver’s license number nor the last four digits of a social security number — information that is required to register to vote in North Carolina. Shortly after the election, the elections board ruled that excluding those votes and the challenged votes cast overseas would violate voters’ due process rights.

Though a state appeals court said in April that those 60,000 voters with purportedly incomplete registrations would have to provide the information to have their votes counted, the state high court disagreed, finding that the votes should be counted and those voters not punished for what the court majority referred to as “mistakes by negligent election officials.” (There are multiple reasons the information may not be included in the database, including simple data entry errors.)

The state high court did agree, however, with the appeals court that overseas voters who did not submit a photo ID must provide one to have their vote counted and that the votes of those who had never lived in the state should be voided. It was that smaller collection of votes at issue in this week’s federal court opinion. Riggs and other interested parties asked the federal court to intervene, arguing that the state high court decision violated federal law.

The state board had said that about 1,500 ballots would need to be “cured” by overseas voters. Though Griffin argued it was higher, even the smaller amount could have been outcome determinative.

At stake in the dispute was not just who would sit on the state supreme court but whether courts themselves were up to the task of defending a North Star of election law: You can’t change the rules after an election. That jurists on both the state appeals court and state supreme court were open to Griffin’s claims constituted a break with democratic norms. In January, prominent scholars urged federal court intervention in the dispute “to preserve democracy in North Carolina and counter the backsliding process.”

Monday’s opinion echoed that sentiment. Permitting parties to “upend” election rules after the election leads to confusion and turmoil, Myers wrote, and “threatens to undermine public confidence in the federal courts, state agencies, and the elections themselves."

Erin Geiger Smith is a writer and editor at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Suggested Citation: Erin Geiger Smith, Griffin Concedes to Riggs, Ending Six-Month Dispute Over North Carolina Supreme Court Election, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (May 8, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/griffin-concedes-riggs-ending-six-month-dispute-over-north-carolina