Today, a North Carolina judge rejected a request from the Republican National Committee (RNC), North Carolina GOP, Wake County GOP and two voters to toss out nearly 60,000 ballots cast in all November 2024 statewide races.
The ruling comes against the backdrop of concurrent legal challenges brought by the losing GOP candidate for North Carolina Supreme Court Seat 6, Jefferson Griffin, who is relentlessly contesting his defeat to incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs that was confirmed by two separate recounts.
The certification of Riggs’ victory by the North Carolina State Board of Elections currently remains on hold as a result of a Jan. 7 order from the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court issued in one of Griffin’s ongoing contests.
Largely similar to Griffin’s cases, Republicans’ legal bid mounts challenges to tens of thousands of ballots cast by voters whom the GOP alleges unlawfully failed to provide driver’s license or social security numbers on their voter registration applications. However, unlike Griffin’s lawsuits, the recent GOP action did not raise claims against ballots cast by certain overseas voters.
According to the GOP suit, the state board — a named defendant in the case — processed over 225,000 voter registration applications prior to December 2023 without collecting the required identification information and failed to take swift action to identify and remove unqualified voters from the state’s voter rolls.
The claims in the case are nearly identical to those in a separate RNC case filed in August 2024, which a court dismissed in part ahead of the November general election.
In a Jan. 2 motion for a preliminary injunction, Republicans asked a Wake County Superior Court judge to order the election board to immediately set aside the challenged ballots, contact voters to request the missing information and remove from the final election tally ballots cast by voters who are unable to provide the necessary identification.
Today’s order denying the motion concluded that “careful balancing of the equities, cannot conclude by the greater weight of the evidence that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent immediate and irreparable harm.”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC), which sought involvement in the case, urged the court to reject the GOP’s request, describing it as a “mass voter suppression” effort that aimed to “delete the votes of tens of thousands of voters in every state and municipal election not because those voters are ineligible or did anything wrong, but because of an alleged record keeping problem.”
The DNC noted that all of the registrants at issue proved their identities when they first voted, as required by federal law. Additionally, the Democrats explained that the Republican challenge is broader in scope as compared to Griffin’s, since it not only sought to remove ballots in the state Supreme Court race, but also in “completely undisputed” state and local races.
Read the order here.
Learn more about the case here.
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