RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina's highest court blocked on Tuesday the certification of a November election result for one of its own seats so it can review legal arguments by a trailing candidate who contends over 60,000 ballots that were cast shouldn't be counted.
The decision by the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court to issue the temporary stay is a setback for Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs. Election results show Riggs ahead of GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin by just 734 votes from over 5.5 million ballots cast.
The ultimate winner gets an eight-year term on a Supreme Court where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans.
The State Board of Elections dismissed last month Griffin's written protests challenging the ballots. That initiated a timeline in which the board would issue a certificate confirming Riggs' election this Friday — ending the litigation — unless a court stepped in.
Tuesday's order stops such certification and tells Griffin and the board to file legal briefs with the justices over the next two weeks.
Lawyers for Griffin, who is a judge on the intermediate-level state Court of Appeals, initially asked the state Supreme Court to intervene three weeks ago. But the elections board quickly moved the matter to federal court, saying Griffin's appeals involved matters of federal voting and voting rights laws.
Griffin disagreed, and so did U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who on Monday returned the case to the state Supreme Court. Myers — a nominee to the bench by Donald Trump — wrote that Griffin’s protests raised “unsettled questions of state law” and had tenuous connections to federal law.
Hours later, Griffin's attorneys asked the state Supreme Court for the temporary stay, which the court granted.
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