Are North Carolina Republicans trying to steal a state Supreme Court seat?

North Carolina’s Supreme Court has temporarily prohibited the state’s Board of Elections from certifying the election of sitting Democratic Justice Allison Riggs to the bench on Tuesday, despite her 734-vote victory over Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin. 

The court’s decision is not an out-and-out bar on the certification of the election’s results; it’s a stay, meaning the board of election can’t declare the results final. The state Board of Elections was set to certify the results of the November 5, 2024, election Friday absent the court’s intervention.

Griffin, who sits on the state’s Court of Appeals, and state Republicans have filed hundreds of cases challenging Riggs’s victory. Those cases hinge on the claim that 60,000 ballots are ineligible, primarily because voters did not provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote.

The battle for the Supreme Court seat is part of the power struggle that has long animated North Carolina politics, particularly in the past eight years since the election of former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. 

The effort to seat Griffin follows congressional gerrymandering meant to favor the GOP, legal maneuvering weakening the power of incoming Democratic officials, and the establishment of a GOP supermajority in North Carolina’s legislature in 2023. Though Republicans currently control North Carolina’s partisan, seven-member Supreme Court, a successful challenge by Griffin could give the party nearly absolute control: Currently, the state’s highest court has five Republican members and two Democratic justices, one of whom is Riggs.

This is the latest setback in a two-month saga

On Election Day, Griffin appeared poised to beat Riggs, a longtime civil rights lawyer, by 10,000 votes. But a 10-day process known as canvassing — in which county elections officials count mail-in votes and provisional ballots — revealed the election had gone in Riggs’s favor. 

However, because her margin of victory was so slim — only 635 votes at that point — Griffin demanded a recount, which he was entitled to under state law. (If a candidate bests another by fewer than 10,000 votes, the losing candidate can request a recount, but one is not automatically triggered.) The board of elections performed a machine recount, then a hand tabulation, both of which showed Riggs as the winner by a narrow margin — but by then, Griffin had already taken the fight to the courts.

Griffin’s claims are based on a 2023 complaint challenging North Carolina’s registration paperwork, alleging that voter registration forms violated the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. That act states all voter registration forms must include a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, with some exceptions; according to the complaint, North Carolina’s voter registration material did not make it clear that either a driver’s license number or the Social Security identification was required. The state board of elections agreed and amended the registration paperwork but ruled that it should be able to accept the old voter registration forms as well. 

That 2023 complaint that provides the foundation for Griffin’s challenge was filed by a private North Carolina citizen, Carol Snow, who called herself an “election denier” in an email to CBS News last year. According to CBS News, Snow is part of an activist group connected to the Election Integrity Network, which was started in an effort to overturn the 2020 election, through a North Carolina umbrella group.

Griffin’s challenge made it to a federal Court of Appeals, which then kicked it back down to the state Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision halts the certification while the Court hears the case.

Complicating the case is the question of whether a federal or state court should have jurisdiction in the case. The case came before the state Supreme Court after a federal district judge ruled that it didn’t need to be decided at the federal level. However, the board of elections is still pursuing the case in the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that it concerns a federal statute; Griffin maintains that the state court is the correct venue because it concerns state election law. Riggs has requested that a federal appeals court decide the issue. 

“The Griffin camp’s theory is, there’s a parallel statute in North Carolina, this is a state race for state office,” Bob Orr, a former associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, told Vox. “There’s nothing federal about it, and therefore the state court should resolve it.” 

North Carolina’s Supreme Court has become increasingly partisan in its decision-making, most notably when it comes to abortion rights. Riggs holding onto her seat wouldn’t change that reality, but it would help Democrats maintain a presence on the court that they could try to build on in future election cycles. That’s especially significant as the federal Supreme Court has decided issues like abortion should be left to the states to decide.

“Democrats are digging themselves out of a hole on the Court, and they need to hold this seat,” Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College in North Carolina, told Vox. “It’s kind of like what they needed to do with the General Assembly, and that is break at least one chamber’s supermajority Republican numbers. If they were to lose the seat, that drops them down to one”: Democratic Justice Anita Earls, whose eight-year term ends next year.

That means whether or not Riggs can take her spot on the bench is important not just for current Democratic priorities in the state, but also for future Democratic goals in the state. Griffin must submit his legal argument to the North Carolina Supreme Court by January 14.