A federal judge on Monday kicked the battle over an election to fill a spot on North Carolina's Supreme Court back to the state's highest court.
North Carolina's highest court on Tuesday then blocked the certification of the election results between Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs and GOP challenger Jefferson Griffin.
Griffin lost the general election, and two recounts later, one statewide machine recount and a partial hand-to-eye recount of ballots from randomly selected early voting sites and Election Day precincts in each county, still showed Riggs in the lead, according to WUNC. The results show the Democrat ahead by just 734 votes from over 5.5 million ballots cast, but Riggs is contending that 60,000 ballots cast should be invalidated.
The ultimate winner gets an eight-year term on a Supreme Court where five of the seven current justices are registered Republicans.
Most of the ballots that Griffin is challenging came from voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — which a state law has required be sought in registration applications since 2004. Before the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002, voter registration forms did not clearly require that people list the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver's license number.
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Yet it's still legal to vote in cases where a person's last four Social Security numbers or driver's license digits cannot be validated. People can still present a HAVA document, such as a utility bill, and the state elections administration office is required to then assign that person a special identification number to register to vote, according to WUNC.
Other large categories of votes that Griffin is challenging were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. but whose parents were deemed North Carolina residents and by military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots. In accordance with federal law, the state administrative code says overseas voters are exempt from that requirement, WUNC reported.
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.
"In the absence of a stay from federal court, this matter should be addressed expeditiously because it concerns certification of an election," Tuesday's order read.
The order said that Riggs recused herself from the matter and that Associate Justice Anita Earls, the other Democrat on the court, opposed the stay in part because the "public interest requires that the Court not interfere with the ordinary course of democratic processes as set by statute and the state constitution."
Attorneys for the State Board of Elections and Riggs quickly filed appeals notices for Myers’ decision with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The state board later on Tuesday asked the appeals court to direct Myers to take back the litigation from the state Supreme Court and block its return to the state court while the matter is appealed.
Barring intervention by federal appeals judges, the Republican-majority state Supreme Court would essentially be asked to decide the winner for one of its own seats.
The State Board of Elections dismissed Griffin's written protests challenging the ballots last month. 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.
Democratic allies of Riggs have accused Griffin and the state GOP of trying to overturn legitimate election results.
Riggs "deserves her certificate of election and we are only in this position due to Jefferson Griffin refusing to accept the will of the people," state Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said in a news release.
The state election board that dismissed Griffin's protests is composed of three Democrats and two Republicans.
The Supreme Court in the nation's ninth-largest state has been a partisan flash point in recent years in court battles involving redistricting, photo voter identification and other voting rights.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
