GOP candidate drops closely watched challenge in North Carolina Supreme Court election

By Dianne Gallagher and Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — A Republican North Carolina judge who launched an unprecedented effort to overturn his unofficial loss in a state Supreme Court race is dropping his challenge to the results.

Judge Jefferson Griffin will not appeal a federal court’s ruling ordering that the election be certified in his Democratic opponent’s favor, he announced in a statement obtained by CNN. The case had been closely watched for how it laid out a playbook for a losing candidate to try to reverse a defeat with arguments focused on apparent clerical errors and other technicalities, rather than voting fraud.

In the statement, Griffin said that he had been focused on “upholding the rule of law and making sure that every legal vote in an election is counted.”

“While I do not fully agree with the District Court’s analysis, I respect the court’s holding —just as I have respected every judicial tribunal that has heard this case,” he said. “I will not appeal the court’s decision.”

After two recounts showed Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs had held on to her seat by 734 votes, Griffin sought to throw out tens of thousands of votes, with election protests mostly focused on Democratic-leaning counties. His lawyers never put forward evidence of voter fraud in the election, instead arguing that the rules set out by North Carolina election officials were not lawful. Election experts and voting rights advocates warned that if Griffin was successful, using such tactics would become the norm and that voters would increasingly face the possibility of being disenfranchised at no fault of their own.

In a statement, Justice Riggs, a former voting rights attorney, said that she was “glad the will of the voters was finally heard, six months and two days after Election Day,” but said there had been “immeasurable damage done to our democracy.”

The state election board will issue a certificate of election to Riggs on Tuesday, board spokesman Patrick Gannon told CNN.

“The State Board already certified the canvassed vote totals in this contest at a public meeting on December 11, 2024. Accordingly, now that the protests in this contest have been resolved, the State Board will administratively issue a certificate of election, pursuant to the canvassed vote totals,” Gannon said.

GOP-leaning state courts, including the North Carolina Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a sizable majority, sided with Griffin on some of his arguments, putting in jeopardy potentially thousands of overseas ballots cast in the race. (Riggs recused herself from the case).

However, US District Judge Richard Myers III, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled earlier this week that the state supreme court had violated the constitution in how it handled Griffin’s protests.

“You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done,” Myers wrote, explaining how the state court’s order violated the Constitution’s due process protections.

The state supreme court had ordered that overseas voters who had not provided photo ID be required to do so to have their votes counted. At the time of the election, those voters were exempt from state’s photo voter ID requirement – under regulations issued by the state board of elections that were not challenged by the North Carolina GOP at the time.

Additionally, the state supreme court had ordered the disqualification of ballots cast by overseas voters who had marked on a form, some by mistake, saying they had never lived in North Carolina. So-called never residents had been allowed to vote under a longstanding state law if they had a parental tie to the state. The state court ruled that the law violated the state constitution, which requires residency to vote.

While Myers didn’t question the state court’s ruling that these policies violated state law, he found that retroactively removing the ballots would be unconstitutional.

Griffin initially sought to challenge a much broader pool of ballots – roughly 60,000 votes cast early or by mail in a handful of Democratic counties. He had argued they should be rejected because those voters’ registration records lacked a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number.

Those deficiencies were believed to be the result of errors by election officials, and Griffin did not put forward evidence that any of those voters had committed fraud. The state supreme court had rejected that aspect of his election protests.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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