Judge orders officials to certify Democrat’s win for N.C. Supreme Court

A federal judge on Monday ordered North Carolina election officials to certify a November election and confirm the narrow victory of a Democratic justice on the state Supreme Court.

The order was the latest development in a back-and-forth legal saga that has gone on for six months. The Republican who lost the case has seven days to appeal the decision, which could prolong the dispute.

In the order, Richard E. Myers II, chief judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina, wrote that “retroactive changes to election procedures raise serious due process concerns.”

Justice Allison Riggs won the November election by 734 votes, confirmed by two recounts. Her opponent, Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, sued in state court, arguing tens of thousands of votes should be thrown out.

Griffin challenged more than 60,000 votes that were cast by people who did not have the last four digits of their Social Security numbers or other identifiers on file with election officials when they voted in November.

He also challenged the validity of thousands of ballots cast in a few counties by military and overseas voters without a copy of their photo ID. North Carolina requires photo ID for voting, but election officials did not tell military and overseas voters to provide it because of a federal law aimed at making it easier for them to cast a ballot.

Griffin also challenged a smaller group of voters - overseas North Carolinians who checked a box indicating that they have never lived in the United States when they cast an absentee ballot in 2024.

The state Supreme Court last month gave Griffin a partial victory and called into question hundreds and possibly thousands of votes. Riggs and others then went to federal court to argue that voters’ constitutional rights would be violated by the state court’s decision.

Myers agreed with Riggs on Monday, and ordered the state’s elections board to certify the results that showed Riggs narrowly won.

Invalidating votes that had already been cast violated voters’ due process rights, wrote Myers, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019. “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done,” Myers wrote. He stayed the order for seven days to give Griffin a chance to appeal.

A spokesman for Griffin did not immediately say whether he would appeal.

“Today, we won,” Riggs said in a statement following the ruling. “I’m proud to continue upholding the Constitution and the rule of law as North Carolina’s Supreme Court Justice.” Republicans hold a 5-2 majority on the state Supreme Court court.

Democrats have cast Griffin’s legal challenges as an attempt to steal the election. Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, hailed the Monday verdict.

“Today’s order from a Trump-appointed chief U.S. District Court judge must bring an end - once and for all - to Republicans’ attempts to overturn a free and fair election and disenfranchise lawful North Carolina voters months after they cast their ballots,” he said in a statement.

In an analysis of the verdict, Richard Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law, said he expects any appeal to be rejected, citing the due process and equal protection arguments.

“The idea of retroactively changing the rules for which ballots should count - and applying those retroactive rules just selectively in places where the challenging candidate expects to gain relative votes - sure is unconstitutional in any election system that values the rule of law,” he wrote.

The swing state has been riven by political and legal fights since last fall. Trump won North Carolina in 2024 with 51 percent of the vote but Republicans lost the contests for governor, attorney general and a seat on the state’s high court.